Inception:

One blogger teases apart some of the clues in the newly released trailer. Joseph Gordon Levitt seems to be part of a security detail, watching as Lukas Haas is being taken away, and maybe Haas has info that can lead to whatever Ken Watanabe is up to. It seems like people's imaginations are reshaping cityscapes, and cities are also like mazes. But when your mind reshapes cities, sometimes gravity applies and sometimes it doesn't. There's a car explosion in a city, being witnessed by Haas through a window.

Also, it seems like the train racing down the city street is chasing a taxi, which has Tom Hardy in it. Ken Watanabe jumps out of bed with his gun, and there's medicine on his bedside table.

JGL and Haas have a man tied to a chair, and JGL says, "We've got to get out of here. Give him the kick!" JGL fights in a room where the walls and floor are shifting around, and masked men walk in on two men who are tied up, as prisoners. Also, Leonardo DiCaprio is holding something as he's drowned in that bathtub. [Eating Class, thanks Gerard!]

Paranormal Activity 2:

Micah Sloat talks about the inevitable sequel:

I can't say anything specific about it, but I can definitely tell you that Paramount and the producers are very aware of what happened with Blair Witch 2, and how you can't really take something that's unique like Blair Witch or Paranormal and then follow it up with just a typical, Hollywood horror film. It just doesn't work. I think you can expect Paranormal Activity 2 to be just as unique, or at least have a quality of uniqueness, just like the original did, in its own way and I think it's really going to be a great movie.

[MovieWeb]

Lost:

More mysterious spoilers: One of the original Losties from the start of season one will try to kill himself, but Jack will save him. (And I'm guessing this is in alternate universe-land. Just a guess, since OG castaways are in short supply in the regular timeline.) Also, someone "tall, dark and handsome" whom we've known a long time will die within the first four hours, in the season's first shocking death. [E! Online]

Sawyer begins the new season racked with guilt over the events of the previous season finale, and Josh Holloway says Sawyer needs a second chance to rectify some of his mistakes. The badass Sawyer will be back in 2010, but first he'll get some closure with Juliet in some "poignant" scenes that set up important developments later on. But Sawyer says his grief over Juliet makes it "not possible for him to be with Kate. Right now, he doesn't give a f—- about life…or anyone in it. He's destroyed inside. There's an undeniable love for Kate, but everything inside of him is fighting not to go there." Also, it sounds like Sun and Jin will be separated again this year. [TV Guide Magazine]

Some more details about the Sun/Jin episode. There's a crucial scene involving Sun, a beat-up Jin, Sayid, Keamy (who has a gunshot wound in his side), Omar (who has a GSW in his stomach), and Mikhail (who looks young, has both eyes, and speaks Korean). In the scene Mikhail surprises Sun and takes her hostage, and they come around the corner, and there's Keamy, already shot. Mikhail goes to check on Keamy, and Jin jumps him. Mikhail and Jin fight. Jin shoots at Mikhail three times, hitting him in the eye the third time. Also, the Sun/Jin episode includes scenes at Sydney Airport and a Korean bank. And a car will drive off a pier.

Meanwhile, scientists are chasing Sawyer down to the beach. And we'll see a new camp full of airplane stuff — and this turns out to be Claire's camp. We'll learn what Claire has been up to all this time, and it's pretty "wild." [The Transmission via SpoilersLost]

Some rumors/hints from inside sources. Supposedly a great deal of the season opener takes place on Flight 815, and we'll see Desmond on the plane. Plus we'll see the Statue from the plane, and Jack bumps into Kate on board the plane. Jack saves Charlie once again — and maybe this is the suicide that Jack prevents? We'll see Juliet die, but first she gets a final kiss. Jacob appears to Hurley, Jack and Sawyer fight again, and it's "pretty fucking crazy." [SpoilersLost]

Dollhouse:

The next episode, "Getting Closer," includes Bennett (Summer Glau), November/Mellie, Mr. Dominic AND Whiskey/Claire Saunders. And here's a description:

Topher races to reconstruct Echo's original personality and memories when Adelle realizes they are the key to averting a devastating future. Meanwhile, Echo and Bennett's shared past and the identity of the Rossum's Corpration's mysterious leader are revealed in the all-new "Getting Closer" episode of DOLLHOUSE airing Friday, Jan. 8

[Summer-Glau.net]

Doctor Who:

John Simm answers YOUR questions about his return as the Master. Not all that spoilery, though. [Pop Culture Zoo]

Batman: The Brave And The Bold:

A series of clips and some awesome pics from Friday's episode, "The Revenge Of The Reach," featuring Guy Gardner, the Challengers Of The Unknown, Blue Beetle and the Green Lantern Corps. Looks like a late Xmas present to those of us who loved the Rogers run on Blue Beetle. [Comic Book Resources]

Smallville:

A new mid-year teaser includes a few tantalizing glimpses. [OSCK]

Heroes:

Here's the official description for episode 4x15, "Close To You." A grim vision of the future? That never happens on this show!

H.R.G. EXPOSES SAMUEL'S GREATEST WEAKNESS IN AN EFFORT TO STOP HIM - LISA LACKEY, DAWN OLIVIERI AND ELISABETH ROHM GUEST STAR - H.R.G. (Jack Coleman) recruits Matt (Greg Grunberg) to help him take down Samuel (Robert Knepper), as they use his long-lost love, Vanessa (guest star Kate Vernon), to lure him to them, but Samuel has his own plans for Vanessa in the works. Meanwhile, Hiro (Masi Oka) and Ando (James Kyson Lee) go to extreme lengths to save Dr. Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy). Elsewhere, Peter's (Milo Ventimiglia) introduction of Emma (guest star Deanne Bray) to his mother (Cristine Rose) brings forth visions of a very grim future.

[HeroSite]

Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder.

Return (and Batman and Robin) writer Grant Morrison broke the sad news during an interview with Comic Book Resources:

Those amazing [preview] visuals were all Andy Kubert's work. They'd make great toys, wouldn't they? Somebody should get started on that. The League of Historic Batmen. Andy just went to town with the idea of what Batman might look like if he'd developed in these different time periods. How would the bat-equipment work? How would you get the mask effect? Or the effect of a cape? If you look behind the six covers Andy's done – they all join up into one big image – Bruce is mostly wearing sort of conventional period clothes, dictated by the in-story logic. In the first story, Bruce is actually stripped to the waist, as we saw him on the last page of "Final Crisis." All he has is his utility belt. So we don't necessarily get to see him as Bat- Pirate with the flowing beard of dreadlocks and the mask, which genuinely breaks my heart [laughs].

For those who don't care about time-traveling Dark Knights, Morrison offered a great tease about what's upcoming in the monthly Batman and Robin series' next storyline:

This is our version of a Batman crossover team-up event – done in three issues and set mostly in England. We have the Knight and the Squire. Death and rebirth. And Batwoman's in it. It's a micro-"Crisis" [laughs]... There's just something about the idea of the "English Batman" who can't handle his father's death and blows all his inheritance on drink and drugs and women. He had to be dragged back from the gutter by this tough little working class girl and her mom. So there's a great class thing with the two characters. She's a street kid and he's an aristocrat. Their adventures have little echoes of the Steed and Peel "Avengers," and there's a bit of "Doctor Who" in there, too. This three-issue arc is a kind of mash-up of every British comic or cult TV show in a way. But with Batman.

Sold!

Batman and Robin #7 is released next month.

To The Batcave With Grant Morrison [Comic Book Resources]

Chances are, you've come across lots of SF stories where a disabled person regains the ability to walk in some fantastical way. Usually it's a guy, and his ability to stand up on his two legs is portrayed as a reclaiming of his virility and power. Often times, the disabled hero regains full mobility along the way towards becoming super-powered — or as part of a package of superpowers.

Oftentimes, the regained mobility comes from some kind of fancy assistive technology. And yet, these stories always draw a really sharp distinction between the wheelchair (which is also assistive technology) and this other tech, which is better or more natural. Or more rugged and manly, perhaps. (Both Jake Sully and John Locke defiantly say something along the lines of, "Don't tell me what I can't do.")

So here are 20 characters from science fiction who regained the ability to walk:

Star Trek gives us Captain Christopher Pike, who's stuck in a wheelchair and unable to express himself other than by flashing a light "Yes" or "No." (As Evan Dorkin tweeted yesterday, "Nice 23rd cent tech there, btw. Beep. Boop. Stupid Star Trek.") Captain Pike's mind is still alive in there, but nobody's figured out a way for him to use Morse code, or translate his brain activity into speech. So Spock takes matters into his own hands, risking his own career and Captain Kirk's command to help Captain Pike return to Talos IV, the planet of the obscene craniums. There, Captain Pike can live in a kind of dreamworld for the amusement of the sterile Talosians, but at least he'll be perfectly healthy.

Doctor Who has had lots of wheelchair-bound characters, including the evil Davros and the vicious Collector. But the first character to rock a wheelchair in Who was actually one of the good guys — Dortmun, one of the leaders of the anti-Dalek resistance in "Dalek Invasion Of Earth." Dortmun is confined to a wheelchair due to one of his many failed attempts to devise an anti-Dalek explosive. And not coincidentally, he's a terrible leader whose super-explosives never do what they're supposed to. But then Dortmun finally redeems himself, confronting the Daleks and buying time for the others to escape — by climbing out of his wheelchair and standing to face the Daleks at last. His redeeming act of heroism is clearly linked to his abandonment of the chair. (Skip to about 2:30 in the video.)

Batman gets his spine broken in the Knightfall crossover, by the supervillain Bane. Throughout the extremely long Knightquest storyline that follows, Bruce Wayne walks with a cane or travels in a wheelchair. He searches for Tim Drake's parents, despite the warnings of a spinal surgeon that he's only making his spine damage worse and more incurable. Luckily, his new girlfriend, the altruistic Dr. Shondra Kinsolving, turns out to have magical healing powers, and she heals Batman, giving herself irreparable brain damage in the process. There's a lot of lightning involved, okay? We're all so glad to see Bruce smack around the blond imposter, we don't really care how Bats got his back back. I actually bought the novelization of Knightfall for $1.00 because I was curious to see if Denny O'Neil would make Batman's recovery make any sense whatsoever. Here's how O'Neil writes it:

"Shondra, we've got to get away from that window," Bruce said. "I can't move, so you'll have to —"

"Don't worry," Shondra whispered. "You'll be fine."

Her hand slipped over his, and her fingers tightened slightly. He felt as though she were touching every cell of his body at once — soothing, quieting, healing. The world went away, then, ebbed away from him, and he was left alone with Shondra's touch in a place where there was no pain and terror.

And that's it. The next time we see Bruce in the novelization, he's "shirtless, barefoot, moving as easily and gracefully as he ever had in his life," with the sun on his shoulders.

The X-Men's leader, Professor X, is in a wheelchair — except for all the occasions in which he's been able to get out of it. At one point, Professor X gets the Starjammers' physician, Sikorsky, to clone him a new body with no disabilities. At another point, the mysterious Xorn "heals" Professor X using his special powers over metal — until it turns out that Xorn is really Magneto, and he's just been dicking Professor X around.

Gallilee by Clive Barker features a first-person narrator, Maddox, who's been in a wheelchair for 150 years, ever since he was maimed in an accident. An apocalyptic vision causes Maddox to realize time is running out, causing him to write down his family history — and then he has a spiritual epiphany, which in turn causes him to realize he can walk once more.

The Animorphs freak out after their identities are discovered by the evil Yeerks — and they decide to recruit some more kids to join their team, in case the original members all get captured. So they decided to recruit disabled kids to be the new group of Auxillary Animorphs, because they figured the Yeerks wouldn't have bothered to infest a disabled kid. (So the Animorphs could skip the three-day screening period for new recruits.) And they figure the morphing powers would cure any disabilities. The leader of the Auxillary Animorphs, James, is paralyzed, until he becomes and Animorph and regains full mobility.

The Doom Patrol features its own version of Professor X, the disabled scientist Niles Caulder. And just as Grant Morrison got Professor X out of his wheelchair, Morrison did the same for Niles in the early 1990s. In one issue, Robotman rushes to tell Niles that somebody's shot Joshua. Niles Caulder says (from off panel) "Cliff, Cliff, Cliff. Isn't it obvious?" And as you turn the page, you discover that Niles is standing up, and revealing that he's the one who shot Joshua. It turns out that nanotechnology cured Niles, although later he winds up as just a severed head — and finally, he's back in the wheelchair, with a complete body again.

The Talents by Anne McCaffey includes a character named Peter Reidinger, whose spine is damaged after a wall falls on him, paralyzing him for life. Until Peter realizes he's actually a powerful telekinetic, and he teaches himself to walk by moving his own limbs telekinetically.

Star Wars: Commenter db4dbms points out that Darth Vader is basically a torso inside a robotic exoskeleton, since Anakin had his arms and legs chopped off.

Robot Wars Book 5: Final Battle by Sigmund Brouwer features Tyce, a 14-year-old whose damaged spine has been hooked up to a device that lets him control robots. Tyce thinks about having an operation that would restore his ability to walk (at the cost of his ability to control robots). But then his toes start to wiggle all on their own, after he kills the first woman president of the United States (by accident, I think.)

Green Lantern John Stewart left the Lantern Corps after his wife got killed, and winds up joining the Darkstars, who have much less cool uniforms. Unfortunately, John gets badly injured defending the planet Rann, and becomes disabled. Until Hal Jordan, in his identity as Assclown — I mean, Parallax — heals John Stewart on his way to reignite the sun and save everyone.

Dark Angel gives us Logan Cale, a steely eyed cyber-journalist who's secretly known as Eyes Only. After Logan is injured in an accident, he's paralyzed from the waist down, and hires a live-in physical therapist named Bling. (Who, I'm just guessing, teaches Logan the healing power of giant medallions?) And then Logan meets a guy named Phil, who has an exoskeleton and agrees to give Logan one. The exoskeleton allows Logan to walk, and say goodbye to Bling!

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card shows Miro, who's been disabled and unable to speak normally, discarding his old body and creating a new one by teleporting Outside. The new body is intact, and allows Miro to do all the things he could do before his accident. (Thanks, TVTropes!)

The X-Files episode "All Souls" features a wheelchair-bound girl, who's able to walk out of her house miraculously. Then she's found dead, in a "praying position" with her eyes burned out — and the same thing may be coming for two other similar girls, unless Scully can work out the whole faith-vs-science thing pronto.

M.A.N.T.I.S., Sam Raimi's short-lived superhero series, features a scientist who's confined to a wheelchair — until he puts on his exoskeleton and becomes the crime-fighting dynamo M.A.N.T.I.S.!

Alpha Flight features Roger Bochs, a double amputee, who can "phase" into giant robot armor, allowing him to walk around and do superhero stuff. Later on, a healer gives him actual fleshy legs. But then it turns out that the healer harvested the legs from corpses, and the graft fails.

The Cure by F. Alexander Brejcha is unusual, in that it's a story about a disabled person being cured, written by an actual disabled person. Brejcha writes, in an author's note, that he's paraplegic, while his main character is quadraplegic. Not surprisingly, it deals a lot more with the main character's insecurity and adjustment problems after nanotech restores his mobility.

Dr. Strangelove regains the ability to walk, thanks to the awesomeness of setting off a doomsday device that ravages the globe.

Lost's John Locke is confined to a wheelchair for four years after his con-man bio-dad tosses him out a window. Locke will never walk again... until he goes to the Island, where he's suddenly healed, and becomes the awesome, rugged outdoorsman he always dreamed of being. In one episode, "The Man Behind The Curtain," Ben taunts Locke that the "old" Locke was so ineffectual, he got kicked off a Walkabout "because you couldn't walk." Locke's regained ambulatory status is linked to his virility and is proof that the Island has chosen him as a special person. Ben, meanwhile, is stuck in his wheelchair for a long time, because he's evil and the Island doesn't like him as much. (Although Ben, too, gets to walk eventually, thanks to Locke's presence.)

The Rampaging Hulk features Geoffrey Crawford, a former teacher of Bruce Banner's, who's suffering from a degenerative nerve disease that has him confined to a wheelchair. Bruce visits his old mentor, seeking a cure for his Hulk-itis, and Dr. Crawford has a complicated plan, involving mapping Bruce's DNA and using a teleporter to separate him from his Gamma radiation — but it's actually a scheme to steal Bruce's powers, so Crawford can Hulk out and escape from his wheelchair. Crawford becomes the monstrous Ravage, and puts the beatdown on the Hulk. Including the great sound effect, "Snap!". Also, in Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner suffers from ALS, but then Reed Richards miraculously cures him. Then Banner turns to the reader, breaking the fourth wall, and explains there's no cure for ALS in real life and you should donate to research charities. Also, in an episode of The Incredible Hulk TV show, Banner is paralyzed from the waist down, until he Hulks out, which soon heals him.

Heroes' Arthur Petrelli is a rare example of an evil person who overcomes disability, thanks to the power of evil. I've blotted out the events of season three from my mind, but as near as I can tell, Mama Petrelli poisons Papa Petrelli, but he survives — except that he's totally paralyzed and unable to move. Until he absorbs the healing power from Adam/Kensei and becomes an unstoppable evil-eyebrow machine. Also on Heroes, Daphne has cerebral palsy and is unable to walk... until her mutant ability kicks in and makes her the fastest runner in the world, because irony.

Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder. Thanks also to Danny Sichel.

The 1990s were a pretty weak time for movies based on both video games and superhero comics. On the video game side, there were Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter and a couple of Mortal Kombat films. And on the superhero front, Batman acted out the law of diminishing returns. And that was about it. (I'm going to pretend Steel didn't exist.)

And then in the 2000s, CG visual effects caught up to the amazing superpowered spectacles that comics and games had led us to expect. In 2000, Bryan Singer, well-regarded director of The Usual Suspects, directed X-Men, which was a huge success. And the floodgates of superhero movies opened. Meanwhile, we got movies based on Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, and a ton of others.

But superhero movies have vastly outgrossed video-game movies, according to Box Office Mojo: $7.2 billion to $900 million. (And to be fair, the site lists 77 superhero films, and only 28 video-game films.) Not only that, but directors like Singer, Christopher Nolan, Sam Raimi, Jon Favreau and Ang Lee have been willing to venture into superhero films. By contrast, the most well-known video-game directors are people like Paul W.S. Anderson, and... Uwe Boll.

Why is this? There seem to be a few reasons. For one thing, many of the most successful video games haven't yet made the leap to movies. Neill Blomkamp's Halo film could have been the X-Men of video-game movies, but it fell apart. Ditto for Gore Verbinski's BioShock movie, which seems to have stalled out due to budgetary concerns.

And it's possible that translating video games to movies requires a higher level of CG mastery than translating comic books — the CG renditions of superhero comics just have to live up to our memories of 2-D pen-and-ink drawings. A live-action CG rendition of a video game, meanwhile, has to look cooler than the already impressive computer graphics most games serve up these days.

But also, movie adaptations of video-game films have generally employed the same kinds of story logic you used to see in the Joel Schumacher Batman films. Like, really — the Doom film, which featured evil alien parasites whose tongues could tell if you were genetically evil or not. Let me just repeat that: They had tongues that could genetically scan you and figure out if you were evil. No superhero movie in the past decade has shown that level of disrespect for the audience or the material. Sure, the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil films were a lot better — but even the mediocre superhero films showed a certain commitment to telling a semi-coherent story. Most comic-book heroes have decades of stories in the bank, however contradictory and full of holes, and the films have gotten slightly better about drawing on them.

But maybe the crux of it is that superhero films learned the difference between respect for the format, and respect for the characters. In some superhero films earlier in the decade, you saw some half-assed attempts at making "comic book panels" and captions on the screen — this was especially heinous in Ang Lee's Hulk. But as the decade went on, superhero films learned that the format wasn't what made these worlds awesome. Meanwhile, even as video games became more cinematic, the movies based on them haven't been able to distinguish between paying homage to video-game action, versus translating it to the different format.

But the other thing that becomes apparent, after you look at all of the superhero and video-game films of the past decade, is that the overall level of quality of both has been pretty bad. For every X-Men 2, Spider-Man or The Dark Knight, there are plenty of films like X-Men 3, Wolverine, Catwoman, Daredevil, and so on. Uwe Boll would have to work overtime and weekends to make a film half as bad as Catwoman. Superhero movies have won, in part, due to sheer quantity — if you generate a large enough mountain of crap, some good stuff will rise out of it. But also, a movie doesn't have to be good to make ten squillion quatloos.

But one thing's for sure: The House That Bryan Singer Built won't stand forever. Something's going to come along and knock superhero movies off their perch, establishing a new Hollywood feeding frenzy. Will it be video-game films? Maybe, if the ten video game movies that are in the pipeline actually get made, and achieve Dark Knight/Iron Man levels of success. It really only takes one movie to make half a billion dollars to turn on the firehose of copycats and sequels.

And even though Avatar isn't based on a video game, it's enough like a video game that if it has a strong enough second and third weekend, you could see the gears (of war) turning in the studio execs' heads. Avatar could turn out to be the movie that supercharged the video-game movie genre, since its strengths can so easily translate to recreating Dead Space or Bioshock. And of course if Tron Legacy does gangbusters next year, it could also provide a shot in the arm.

But right now, the up-and-coming genre seems to be toy movies instead. The two Transformers movies did superhero numbers, and appealed to a similar sense of nostalgia and escapism to superheroes. And there are tons and tons of toys out there waiting for their moment on the big screen — and unlike video-game companies, toy companies don't have any concerns about making sure the movies do justice to their existing stories. A toy movie doesn't have to tie in with existing continuity or jibe with the stories that have already told. A toy movie has one purpose only: To sell toys.

And that means toy movies can be dumber, and yet also more spectacular, than superhero films and video-game films combined. Just look at the Transformers films — they're so overstuffed and bloated with nonsense, they can barely move, but they have the power to spew crap for miles in all directions. And now there are films based on Monopoly, Battleship, Viewmaster, Stretch Armstrong, Battle Bots, and countless others on the way. Actual directors, like Ridley Scott (Monopoly) and Peter Berg (Battleship), are signing on to these projects.

Toy movies could well win out in the next decade, because the key to success will be casting the widest net for nostalgia among adults aged 18-49. Everybody feels vaguely nostalgic for Monopoly or Battleship — and it's just a matter of time before we get Steven Spielberg's Sorry! or David Lynch's Yahtzee. It's like the perfect combination: Everybody feels nostalgic, but nobody will complain that they got it wrong. How on Earth do you get a Yahtzee movie wrong?

It already seems like we're maxed out on superhero films, when Warner Bros. puts the kibosh on Superman and Wonder Woman movies and a Green Lantern film starring "it" boy Ryan Reynolds struggles to get made. If Marvel follows through on its plans to put out four movies a year, we could discover just how many superheroic origins the movie-going audience can stand. So maybe we'll see more of a blend of action/nostalgia pics, with films based on comics, toys, video games and other sources. Or maybe toy movies will just crush every other film genre, until there's nothing but massive CG recreations of your old plastic playthings, as far as the eye can see.

The object of all slot games for players is to arrive at the bonus round. In Superman, the player gets a chance to save the world when they are in the bonus round, much like the title character does in the comics and in the movies.

Part of saving the world in the bonus round will revolve around destroying missiles and players working their way around meteor fields. In the end, the ultimate goal is to go as far through the bonus round, picking up extra cash along the way.

The popular superheroes have made their rounds in movie theatres and competed for entertainment dollars on the big screen. Now, they will be competing for online players' money. Superman joins the Silver Surfer and the Incredible Hulk as comic icons who now have their own online slot game.

I can see the Hulk being a good icon for Internet gambling, what with the poor impulse control. According to another gambling industry site, besides Superman, the other new characters who've just joined the world of online gambling include Forrest Gump, Braveheart, Batman... and Wonder Woman. Great Hera!

Says a press release:

"Big brands drive player popularity, and that is why CryptoLogic is excited to launch a game based on Superman, one of the most iconic brands of the entertainment world," said Brian Hadfield, CryptoLogic's President and CEO. "By also adding Forrest Gump and Braveheart, CryptoLogic continues its industry leadership in launching branded games that resonate with both the casual and serious player. We aim for these games to be both popular and profitable."

We won't even comment on the fact that we can't get a Superman movie, but we can get Superman slots.

Looking over a decade of superhero storylines, it's easy to see two things: The repetition of ideas, and the genre trying to come to grips with what's happening in the real world (and often failing badly); just look at the increase of terrorist attacks post-9/11. The headlines below - matched to publication date where possible - may not be exactly how the last ten years played out in the real world, but it's possibly the way it happened in our collective subconscious. Well, apart from restarting reality four times, of course.

2000
January - Part of America literally becomes city of the future thanks to time-traveling evil robot (Superman: Y2K storyline).

February - Humanity defeats, kills "God," who is revealed to be a gigantic organic pyramid responsible for life on Earth. 20th Century ends late/early depending on who you talk to with death of Jenny Sparks (The Authority #12).

February - All of humanity temporarily gains superpowers as result of superhero from another dimension powering miracle machine that enables humanity en masse to defeat extra-dimensional being driving the world to the brink of destruction (JLA #41).

June - Earth is hit by artificially-induced natural disasters (New York hit by giant tidal wave, San Francisco partially destroyed by volcano, areas of Africa and Australia face plague of insects, etc.) as result of insane criminal with godlike power (The Authority, "Earth Inferno" storyline).

June-July - World transformed into alternate reality ruled by cartoon laws of physics as result of insane criminal receiving godlike power (Superman: Emperor Joker storyline).

July - New York attacked by alien terrorist whose path of destruction, when viewed from above, spells out "Fuck You" (Marvel Boy #2).

October-November - Earth temporarily designated a prison planet by consortium of alien races, becomes overwhelmed by amount of extra-terrestrial criminals (Maximum Security storyline).

November: Lex Luthor becomes President of the United States of America (Superman: Lex 2000 storyline).

2001
May - A time-traveling despot reveals horrific future if he is not given control of Earth, resulting in international wars as nations disagree on response (Avengers #42).

June - A terrorist attack decimates the homo superior population of Earth, killing hundreds of thousands in one sweep (New X-Men #115).

June-August - Earth becomes centerpoint for alien attempt to destroy the universe, resulting in universe-wide war (Our Worlds At War storyline).

September - The World Trade Center and Pentagon are targeted by terrorists, resulting in the destruction of the former and a worldwide reaction and rescue effort (Amazing Spider-Man #36).

September - A time-traveling despot declares war on humanity (Avengers #46).

October - Large numbers of people/animals become infected by "Joker" virus temporarily, resulting in worldwide insanity (Joker: The Last Laugh storyline).

2002
January - Earth surrenders control to time-traveling despot; large numbers of humanity placed within concentration camps (Avengers #50).

June - The mythical realm of Norse Gods, Asgard, takes up temporary residence above New York City (Thor #50).

July - Every male of every species on Earth dies suddenly. Well, almost every male (Y: The Last Man #1).

August - Capital cities across the globe disappear, only to be revealed to have become part of a giant uber-city as the result of a cosmic entity representing the concept of order (Avengers #57).

October - LA is attacked by giant black sperm as the result of a terrorist attack on behalf of an insane former pornstar (The Filth #5).

December - Mutant terrorists attack New York City, destroy the Brooklyn Bridge and kill eight hundred (Ultimate War #1).

2003
January - Norse Gods invade European nation to ensure religious freedoms (Thor, Iron Man, Avengers: Standoff storyline).

March - 1 in 1000 Americans gains superpowers due to alien virus (Action Comics #801).

March - Mount Rushmore and other areas of South Dakota are attacked by biological weapons (Avengers #65).

May - The island of Micronesia is destroyed in a nuclear explosion, an act that launches an invasion on Earth by alien forces (The Ultimates #10).

September - World transformed into alternate reality with alternate history merging it with parallel Earth as result of godlike beings indulging in wager (JLA/Avengers #3).

September - Mutant terrorists attack New York City, killing thousands and also manage to reverse the polarity of Earth's magnetic poles (New X-Men #147).

2004
February - San Diego plunges into Pacific Ocean, renamed "Sub Diego" after some inhabitants survive as mer-people (Aquaman #15).

February - The White House is attacked by superpowered terrorists (Ultimate Six #5).

February - American Government overthrown by superpowered terrorists (Coup D'Etat storyline).

April - One million people mysteriously vanish from Earth suddenly (Superman #204).

June - Superpowered beings invade Arab nation of Mazikhandar, depose ruler and install new democratic government (Avengers #83).

July-October - New York is attacked by indestructible robots, terrorist organizations and aliens as the result of a delusional superhero with godlike powers (Avengers: Disassembled storyline).

August - New York is invaded by aliens (Fantastic Four #517).

August - Thousands of people kill themselves as result of international broadcast from unknown source (Ultimate Nightmare #1).

2005
March - Europe erupts into riots against a newly announced European Union plan to create super-powered soldiers (Ultimates 2 #5).

March - Military installation is attacked by aliens seeking to prevent humanity from achieving space travel (Ultimate Secret #1).

April - Tens of thousands of people discovered to be nanotech-controlled drones in service to evil satellite orbiting the Earth (The OMAC Project #1).

June-October - World temporarily transformed into alternate reality as result of insane superhero with godlike powers (House of M storyline).

October - Genetic evolution is reversed worldwide by insane superhero with godlike powers, undoing homo superior strain granting superhuman abilities to thousands of people worldwide (House of M #8).

November - Tokyo is attacked by a collection of giant monsters (Fantastic Four/Iron Man: Big In Japan #1).

December - Earth overrun by zombie plague (Marvel Zombies #1).

2006
January - Multiple Earths appear in orbit around Earth (Infinite Crisis #4).

April - Reality is restarted, resulting in a new Earth with altered history (Infinite Crisis #7).

May - Humanity defeats "Galactus," a swarm of alien ships known for destroying planets (Ultimate Extinction #5).

May - Hundreds die in Stamford, Connecticut as a result of superhero negligence; in response, the US Government announces the Superhero Registration Act which will regulate superhuman activity (Civil War #1).

June - Reality is restarted, resulting in a new Earth with altered history (Captain Atom: Armageddon #9).

September - "The Everyman Project" is announced, which can give people synthetic superpowers (52 #21).

October - A cosmic event known as "The White Event" occurs, resulting in people around the world manifesting superpowers (newuniversal #1).

2007
January - All participants in "The Everyman Project" simultaneously lose their powers, resulting in worldwide destruction and death (52 #35).

February - The 50-State Initiative is unveiled, with each state of America given its own superhero team (Civil War: The Initiative #1).

April - Washington DC is invaded by mythical, warlike women (Amazons Attack! #1).

May - Earth is discovered to be one of 52 parallel Earths with alternate histories (52 #52).

August - Earth is invaded by alien gladiators led by the Hulk, returning from interplanetary exile (World War Hulk #1).

August - The mythical realm of Norse Gods, Asgard, takes up temporary residence above the state of Oklahoma (Thor #2).

September - November: Earth is invaded by aliens with magical rings (Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War storyline).

December - History is altered after ill-considered pact between satanic demon and naive superhero and wife (Amazing Spider-Man #545).

December - Alien body-snatching conspiracy is uncovered (New Avengers #37).

2008
April - Alien body-snatching conspiracy turns into full-blown invasion of Earth by shape-changing aliens (Secret Invasion #1).

July - Earth becomes a post-nuclear wasteland (Number Of The Beast #8).

July - Humanity loses free will as result of arrival of godlike entity on Earth (Final Crisis #3).

August-November - World temporarily transformed into alternate reality with alternate history as result of criminals assuming godlike power (Trinity series).

August - Now an endangered species, homo superiors declare San Francisco, CA, to be their new home (Uncanny X-Men #500).

October - Earth becomes home to 1,000,000 refugee aliens (Action Comics #870).

November - Alien shapechanging invasion is finally repelled, ushering in a new era of corrupted authority in incredibly ill-timed political metaphor (Secret Invasion #8).

November - The world is hit by multiple seemingly-natural disasters, including a tidal wave that floods and partially destroys New York City, as first wave of attack by superpowered terrorists (Ultimatum #1).

2009
January - Reality is restarted, resulting in a new Earth with altered history (Final Crisis #7).

March - The United Kingdom is invaded by a vampire army (Captain Britain and MI-13 #11).

August - (ongoing): Earth becomes overrun by reanimated corpses of the dead (Blackest Night storyline)

One of the things I like best about comics is they require no restraint. Most methods of story-telling benefit from some moderation. Comics are like the car pile-up scenes in the Blues Brothers movies. The more you add, the better it gets. No matter what the problem, it can be fixed by piling on a little more.

Problem One: Unpopular Subject
Let's start at the bottom of the barrel: Nazis. From the Batfamily to the Von Trapp Family, everyone hates Nazis. There is just no way to make them work. Or that's what you'd say if you didn't work in comics. If you did, you would see that Nazis are a starting point, a good, golden-age foundation that you can build up into something extraordinary.

Step One: Make them bigger. At first glance, this seems like the wrong way to go. All it does is make giant Nazis. That's no fun.

Step Two: Make them robots. Robots improve everything. Cops, rebellions in galaxies a long time ago and far, far away, Elmo dolls: there's nothing that can't be spiced up by adding robots. And yet, a giant robot Nazi still doesn't have the kick we need. What else can be done?

This. That's what. You take that giant Nazi robot, and you make it into an octopus. A land octopus. In a graveyard. Because, that's why.

Problem Two: A Plethora of Lame Concepts

Start with a shaky base: literally. When is the last time you saw someone on stilts? If you can remember, then I applaud your memory. Stilts are things that provide no value and make the act of walking both harder and more dangerous. They're a terrible concept all on their own.

Now take that terrible concept and make a supervillain out of it. Stiltman has terrorized the Marvel Universe since the sixties, presumably by nearly falling on people and then suing them for damages. Sure, the stilts are electronic and look like high-rises, but a crappy villain way, way up in the air is still a crappy villain.

Now rip off crappy villain with a sadass tribute character. A few weeks ago we saw the debut of Lady Stiltman. For those of you not paying attention, I will repeat the name: LADY StiltMAN.

This is bad piled on bad piled on bad. Nothing can save it. Except something worse.

I don't know how adding a pair of novelty high heels saved this concept, but it did. Some things just need a cherry on top to turn out delicious. I'm the last person in the world to champion putting more comic book women in heels, but when I see this I can only sit back in wonder. Touché, Marvel. Touché.

Problem Three: Gimmicks That Have Been Done to Death

"Who would win in a fight," is the kind of tired speculation that wasn't even fresh in Stand By Me. Now it's torturous. We've seen Batman versus Superman a thousand different times. We've seen Batman versus Captain America, and Captain America versus Iron Man and Iron Man versus Wolverine, and Wolverine versus the Punisher, and the Punisher versus Everydamnone. At this point, the horse is dead.

In comics, there is only one solution to that: Zombie Horse.

When Marvel pitted The Incredible Hercules against Thor for the second time, they just kept trying things until it worked. Last time they had to lift up the entire city of New York. This time, they just had the two heroes switch outfits. I don't know why that's even cooler, but it is. Last time it was a lot of pyrotechnics. This time there was more banter. Again, for some reason it worked. But it needed something more.

And this is why comics will always triumph over other media. When you see that literal purple nurple, splayed gloriously across the page, movie sound effects pale in comparison.

Problem Four: It's Not Crazy Enough Yet

You see, there's this thing called the Green Lantern Corps. They're space cops with battery-powered laser wish-rings. Sound good? No?

But wait! They're actually part of a larger Rainbow Corps, in which each color represents a particular emotions. Now is it good? No again?

The red ring is for rage. Red Lantern Corps members have rings that are powered by anger. And they can spew something that looks like blood but burns you like lava. And even though they are aliens, some of them just happen to look like earth creatures.

And so, without further ado, I present to you the crowning achievement of graphic novels to this date:

Ruffles the Rage Kitty.

Keyboard Cat, Ceiling Cat, and the entire population of I Can Has Cheezburger can go to hell. Nothing can match the genius of this. Nothing.

Caleb Paullus' Super Not Super is a series of brief photo comics exploring the not-so-superheroic trials and tribulations of caped crusaders. Batman finds even he is not immune to the economic meltdown, the Flash fails at physical intimacy, and Catwoman unwinds with a little *ahem* catnip. Sadly, Wonder Woman and Supergirl couldn't be given anything more interesting to do than household chores.

You can read the full comics at Super Not Super.

[via Geekologie]

Greg Cox is one of the most prolific, and successful, authors of media tie-in novels, and he's won a loyal following for his many Star Trek books, including a trilogy filling in the backstory of much-loved villain Khan Noonien Singh. He's also written tie-in novels based on Alias, The 4400, Roswell, Underworld, Fantastic Four and Iron Man. He's also novelized the movies Ghost Rider, Daredevil and several others, plus DC Comics' big crossovers.

We talked to him about his new Terminator Salvation tie-in novel Cold War, out now from Titan Books, plus some of his other recent projects.

Cold War uses the same timeline as McG's recent movie, but only includes a couple of characters from the film: The main character is Losenko, the Russian general who appears briefly in the film, mentioning that Skynet is looking for Kyle Reese, and we learn all about Lysenko's backstory. Says Cox, "When I watched the movie, I was probably the only person who was mentally hanging on every scene with general Losenko," watching for every detail about the character to include in the book. Also in the book is General Ashdown (Michael Ironsides), the resistance leader who lives on a submarine. John Connor only pops in the book as a sort of mythological figure, giving inspirational speeches over the radio.

The new book takes place in Alaska and Russia, in two different time frames: 2003, right after Judgment Day, and then 2018. In 2003, the survivors are coping with the aftermath of the nuclear war, and Skynet is attacking them with really primitive Terminators, and the technology is close to what really existed in 2003. And then in 2018, Skynet has all the same tech it has in the movie — plus snowmobile Terminators, to navigate those frozen northern areas. It sounds like Cox had a lot of fun with the frosty settings:

My big gimmick was snowmobile Terminators. There's also a giant Terminator train. The trick is to try to find stuff in the [same] universe, that's slightly different. What haven't we seen yet? We haven't seen a Terminator train. The main reason for setting it in Alaska [was to include things like] dogsled chases, grizzly bears, avalanches, volcanos... We've seen so many chases on California highways, with fire trucks and emergency vehicles. I was looking for a whole different environment, not just recapitulating what people had done before.

Cox is somewhat surprised that the Terminator/grizzly bear fight has been the main thing people have talked about in his novel. "You can't have a Terminator in Alaska and not have him fight a grizzly bear. Okay, it's gratuitous, but how can I resist having a grizzly bear fight a Terminator?" And now that people have been so excited by it, "from now on, I put a grizzly bear in all my books." Spoiler alert: The bear doesn't stand a chance against a Terminator, says Cox.

There's also a Western-style train heist and loads of detail on a Russian submarine, plus lots of gritty war-movie-style action. Cox watched tons of World War II movies on TCM, read every Tom Clancy novel for the submarine details, and did loads of research on the world right after a nuclear war.

Cox says he watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles "religiously," but Titan Books and Halcyon were adamant that his book couldn't contain any references to T:SCC continuity. So don't expect Cameron to show up, but if anyone ever green-lights SCC novels, Cox will be first in line. The Terminator people were very keen to make sure Cox's book fit in with their vision of the universe, including making sure Skynet wasn't developing high technology too early after Judgment Day — and that meant loads of conference calls, notes and intensive feedback at every stage of the process.

Wrapping up The 4400

The amount of feedback you get from the licensors on a licensed property depends heavily on whether it's an ongoing concern, says Cox. With The 4400, for example, Cox wrote one tie-in novel while the series was on the air, and went through four different drafts in response to feedback. But when Cox wrote the first of two novels wrapping up the series after it ended, Welcome To Promise City, he got a more-or-less free hand. (The other novel, available now, is written by David Mack.) Cox, Mack and their editor cooked up an ending to the series together.

Except for tons of feedback from the fans. Cox says as soon as it was announced that he was writing a 4400 novel explaining what happened after the show's cancellation, he was bombarded with emails from fans all over the world demanding to know what he was going to do with their favorite subplots and characters. "I can't claim we wrapped up every loose end, but we tried to wrap up the important one," says Cox. He and Mack debated with their editor whether to tie up the end of the series with a neat bow, or leave a few things slightly open-ended in case they ended up doing more novels. They settled on the second approach, so if the books sell amazingly well, you might see further continuations of the story.

Novelizing Final Crisis

Cox novelized Infinite Crisis, 52 and Countdown for DC Comics, and now he's novelized Final Crisis, Grant Morrison's narrative-shredding uber-crossover starring the evil Darkseid. How on earth do you take Morrison's loopy storytelling and convert it into a single novel?

There was a lot of condensing involved, Cox admits:

There's not a lot of connective tissue in that series. [There are] a lot of scenes that jump from place to place. I've got to admit, the book is probably a bit more linear than the comic book, especially issue seven, which was jumping all over time. I actually just tried to tell it a bit more in chronological order, and maybe simplify it a bit.

The biggest problem with novelizing one of these sprawling DC crossovers is figuring out what subplots and tie-ins to leave out. The first week Cox was working on the Infinite Crisis novelization, he was trying to include all of the spin-off issues, including things like Rann-Thanagar War One-Shot, and every other miniseries and crossover issue, "and I realized this book is going to take me ten years, and it's going to be the size of The Wheel Of Time." So he began paring things down. Similarly, the Final Crisis book ignores a lot of tie-ins, sadly including the 3-D Superman tie-in series. "I apologize if your favorite scene is not in this book, but there's no way I can get in the 3-D tie in superman issue and the Batman issues and the special tie-in issue of Secret Six."

With novelizations of comics crossovers, "it's all about streamlining." It's the opposite of novelizing movie scripts, which is all about fleshing out the story and characters and adding new stuff to turn a 90-page script into a 300-to-400-page novel. "The script for Ghost Rider was not a terribly long script," notes Cox. He recalls coming across the novelization for Snakes On A Plane and marveling that Christa Faust had managed to get 400 pages out of that film. He felt like sending her fan mail.

Should Khan Come Back?

As the author of three Khan books, Cox is conflicted about whether Khan should appear in the next Star Trek movie. On the one hand, recasting Khan seems almost impossible, given how much Ricardo Montalban put his stamp on the character. On the other, Cox might have said the same thing about recasting Kirk, Spock and McCoy — and J.J. Abrams and crew pulled that off. The real question is, "do you do Botany Bay Khan, or crazy burned-out Wrath Of Khan Khan? There's the young virile but not quite crazy Khan, and then there's the obsessed spent-15-years-in-Hell Khan. And then there's the whole messy [subject of the] Eugenics Wars — when exactly did they take place? Did they take place during the Bill Clinton years?"

Cox is writing one of four new novels that take place in the movie's continuity, picking up where the movie left off. He's written a draft of his novel, but hasn't gotten feedback from Paramount yet, so everything is subject to change. But at least for now, his novel takes place six months after the end of the movie, and follows Captain Kirk and his crew on a stand-alone adventure. And he hints that, if Paramount approves, the fact that the Vulcans are refugees scattered across the universe will play a part in his novel's plot.

For Whedonites, there's a simple choice of Single Issue Of The Week, and that's Angel: A Hole In The World #1, the first issue of a mini-series adapting the episode of the television series where Fred said goodbye and Illyria said hello. In a week weirdly quiet on the single issue front, it'd be a strong contender for everyone else as well.

Other single-issue choices would include DC's two Batman anthologies, Batman 80-Page Giant and Batman: Arkham Asylum Special, and IDW's Transformers: Bumblebee #1). But then there's also the first issue of Boom! Studios' Incorruptible, a companion to their Irredeemable series that asks what happens when a bad guy decides to go good (Clue: It's not as easy as you'd hope). Superhero thrills and spills will be yours.

Elsewhere, take out the credit card for some impressive trades and collections: Dark Horse Comics has a couple of coffee table art books (The Art of Emily The Strange and Drawing Down The Moon: The Art of Charles Vess). But there's also Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, a hardcover collecting the comic versions of Timothy Zahn's three follow-ups to George Lucas' better cinematic threesome.

But while we're mentioning art books, IDW also has a great collection of mid-century sci-fi in the oversized The Art of Steve Ditko hardcover.

In similar media mode, Dynamite's Battlestar Galactica: Cylon War fills in some backstory of the Sci-Fi Channel incarnation of the show, and DC's Fringe collection does the same for those wondering what the deal was with William Bell and Walter Bishop in their younger days.

Those looking for violent superheroics can find their fill with Marvel's output for the week, which includes paperback versions of Secret Warriors Vol. 1 and the demonic X-Men book X-Infernus, as well as a hardcover collection of Thunderbolts: Widowmaker. Tis the season, after all.

Just like last week, next week and every other week of the year - well, except the week after next, because of the holidays - the complete list of everything hitting stores tomorrow is right here for your perusal, and you can find your local comic store here. Just remember: Start planning your skip week activities right now, before it's too late.

This is, of course, just our opinion, and feel free to disagree in comments. We went back and forth about several of these films, and there were a few others that we almost included instead, so we're not claiming infallibility here. If you want to view this in non-gallery format, click here, and I promise it'll work.

Pitch Black. This is nearly the perfect movie — a gritty anti-hero with weird eyes that can see in the dark is on a prison ship, which crashes on an alien planet. The lurking monsters are ominous and alarming, but the film's real mystery is Riddick himself — the Furyan inspires loathing, hero-worship and a desperate longing for the anti-hero to become a hero by the movie's end. Like Riddick's own eyes, our view of him only really works when we see him through total darkness.

Avatar. I'm going to post my review of this film in a few days, closer to its actual release date. But this is definitely one of the decade's most significant science-fiction films, both in its startling new look and in its elaborate alien world. Sigourney Weaver is one of the few heroic scientists we've seen in movies lately, and she fearlessly spouts facts about the science of Pandora. Avatar is by no means a perfect movie — it's a frustrating mixture of brilliance and utter cheese — but it's clearly an important movie in science-fiction history.

Slither. This movie sort of slid (I'm tempted to say slithered) under the radar, but it's one of the great all-time alien possession movies, and a brilliant metaphor for being trapped in a bad marriage. An alien parasite lands in a small town and takes over a woman's awful husband — and then it starts infecting everyone else in town, so that they all speak with the husband's voice. Wherever the wife goes, she hears her husband talking to her. And then people start getting grotesquely pregnant with alien offspring — this sort of thing is really why body horror was invented.

Star Trek. A young hero reluctantly starts to claim his true destined greatness... only to find out that his whole life has been altered, and maybe wrecked, by time-traveling, tattooed maniacs from the future. It's a weird spin on a Star Trek movie, but considering how hard it was to imagine being thrilled by another Trek after Nemesis, this film is a marvel. Plot holes, frat-boy antics, "red matter" and all, it's still the film that recharged Star Trek and may have helped bring back space-opera as a genre. And Spock has never been so... fascinating.

Donnie Darko has garnered an enduring cult fan base, for good reason. Its blend of mysicism and weird physics has aged amazingly well, and we still get lost in its "tangent universes." We keep hoping Richard Kelly will make another film that's both as mind-blowing and as well-constructed as this one.

Robot Stories. Another great movie that didn't get enough props when it came out. Greg Pak, who went on to write the Planet Hulk storyline for Marvel Comics, creates an anthology of three stories about robots that show how much robots are connected to our emotional lives — and what will happen when robots get emotions. In one story, two office robots fall in love, only to find that robot love is forbidden. In another story, a mother becomes determined to help her dying son amass the perfect collection of robot action figures — at any cost, even stealing. You'll see robots in a whole new light after watching this film.

Spider-Man 2. There were a number of superhero films that managed to bring the greatness of comics' storylines to life in the first half of the decade, including two X-Men movies and two Spider-Man movies. For my money, though, this is the best of the bunch, particularly because of Alfred Molina's Doc Octopus. Peter Parker's superpowered angst collides with Doc Octopus' cyborg identity crisis, and both hero and villain seem to be clinging to their identities by a thread. Even though we wish Peter Parker could keep his damn mask on, it's still thrilling and maybe the most perfect straight-up superhero movie of all.

Sleep Dealer. Alex Rivera's look at the dark side of telecommuting is one of the most memorable and intense films we've seen lately. In the future, everything depends on the dollar — you can't even access water reservoirs in Mexico or speak to your family in another town without feeding dollars into a slot. And the only way to get dollars is to get cyber nodes all over your body, allowing your nervous system to pilot machines in the United States. That way the U.S. can import Mexican labor without bringing in actual Mexicans. It's beautifully filmed and harrowing look at the ultimate form of alienated labor.

The Incredibles. The other great straight-up superhero was one of several Pixar films that we wanted to pay tribute to from the past decade. If you were as disappointed as we were by the two Fantastic Four films, then rejoice that this film does the FF right. A surprisingly light-hearted look at super-mutants in a world that learns to fear them, this movie does a better job of portraying what makes superhero comics so awesome than almost any live-action film. And we love the Omnidroid.

The Host. Sorry, Cloverfield — this was the monster-rampage movie we loved from the past few years. Unlike Clovey, the Host actually has a decent if snarky origin story, including weird chemicals dropped in the water by a callous American, causing one of the local creatures to get a little too big (and rambunctious) for comfort. More than almost any other monster movie, this film sucks us into caring about its main characters, a hapless family who operate a failing fast-food stand on the beach — we laugh at their antics and then get hopelessly, tragically, wound up in their fate when they tangle with the monster. Rob and Hud just don't quite measure up.

28 Days Later. Purists may hate this film's "fast zombies," but they're not even really zombies — they're the victims of a "rage" virus that stupid animal-rights activists cause to be released onto an unsuspecting world. Of all the apocalyptic scenarios we've seen in the past decade, 28 Days provides the best dose of terror and the sheer horror of society unraveling. When Christopher Eccleston's vicious soldier says the words, "I promised them women," your gut sinks. And the idea that the rage-virus outbreak will cure itself because the quasi-zombies will starve is genuinely clever. We were tempted to include Danny Boyle's other great SF film of the decade, Sunshine, but 28 Days is clearly better.

Paprika. A parade of nonsense images stomps through a man's dreams, forcing him to jump out a window... and it's just the beginning of the mayhem as the dream world collides with reality, in Satoshi Kon's weird exploration of dreams and their potential to tear our world apart. A machine that allows you to enter someone's dreams therapeutically gets stolen, and soon reality itself is being torn apart. Trippy, insane and mind-expanding, this is a film you need to watch more than once.

Primer. Speaking of films you need to watch more than once... few, if any, science-fiction movies talk down to their audiences less than this one. You don't even realize, for a good chunk of the movie, that the geeky characters are building a time machine. and it comes with very realistic and fascinating limitations, even as it allows the main characters to cross their own timelines over and over again, rewriting history in more and more psychotic ways. The walkman scene makes the whole thing worthwhile, just by itself.

Moon. It's interesting how many of the great science-fiction movies of the past decade are about loneliness, one way or the other — but none of them delve into isolation as hauntingly as Duncan Jones' debut feature. Sam Rockwell is amazing as the two versions of Sam Bell, who's tantalizingly close to finishing out his contract on a lunary mining station — until he finds out that things aren't ever what they seem. Add paranoia to the list of things this film does better than almost any other.

Iron Man. As we wrote when this film came out, it's actually more of a cyborg narrative than a superhero one. Jon Favreau and company wisely chose to focus on the heart of Tony Stark's origin — literally, the fusion reactor that keeps his heart from stopping, and turns him into a part-machine badass whose armor is just a shell that goes over his cybernetic body. Tony Stark's uneasy relationship with the military technology that he created parallels his unease with his new technological body — he's like the heroic flipside of Spider-Man 2's Doctor Octopus. And yes, any movie that talks about our dependence on, and unease with, technology automatically gets to leap over the pile of by-the-numbers superhero films.

The Dark Knight. See here for our argument as to why this film really is science fiction. Shorter version: Batman's fantastical technology is at the heart of the story. If Batman Begins showed how Bruce Wayne used technology to become Gotham's fearsome crime-fighter, then The Dark Knight is about how far he's willing to take that approach in the face of a mad bomber.

District 9. Most science-fiction movies, you come out of furiously debating the science or the finer points of the storyline... but this one, people walked out of speechless and shellshocked. Perhaps the ultimate "humans oppress aliens" movie, this film confronts us with a perfect allegory of our own inhumanity, through the story of a crashlanded group of aliens who are forced into shantytowns. Even before the main character, Wikus, starts turning into one of the aliens, our loyalties are getting more and more divided.

Wall-E. The other Pixar movie we couldn't help including on the list, this may have been the greatest blend of post-apocalyptic dystopia and cute robots. The love between Wall-E and Eve is both lovable and genuinely moving, and the trademark Pixar humor is in full effect with Wall-E's junkyard slapstick and spaceship antics. The funniest, and maybe the best, robot uprising we've ever seen.

Serenity. Just pretend for a second that this wasn't the continuation of a beloved TV series, and that Joss Whedon had created a whole new universe from scratch just for this film — it would still be one of the most audacious, most memorable, science-fiction films of all time. The story of the Alliance, which maintains a tenuous grip on a sprawling star system after a brutal civil war, and the lengths to which the Alliance will go to try and make people "better," Serenity is one of the great action-adventure films as well as one of the neatest SF concepts ever. When you discover the secrets of Miranda and see how River Tam becomes both the messenger and the avenger of Miranda's people, it's hard not to jump up and down in your seat.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. How far are you willing to go to get over a lost love? Are you willing to injure yourself — by erasing a huge chunk of your brief time on this planet from your own mind — just to get back at your former lover? This Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry joint does what all the best science fiction does: it creates a fictional technology that has the potential to change who we are as people, and then it uses it to tell a deeply personal story. The scenes where Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are wandering through Carrey's childhood memories are both unsettling and poignant, as Carrey tries to hold on to the love he was in the process of throwing away — by letting her into more of his mind.

[GameTrailersVia]

Debating crime with Plato. Not going well. Considering employing the Sobatic method and applying a thoughtful kick to the face.

And he also encounters some other time travelers along the way:

Theodore Logan, and Bill S. Preston, Esquire, eh? You want a history lesson? I'M THE GODDAMN BATMAN, DUDES!

Expect plenty of bat-puns ("Just invented the Commissioner Gordian Knot.") and ancient mysteries resolved through bat-logic ("The real secret of the pyramids? Ancient Batsignal.").

TimeLostBatman [Twitter via reddit]

In this era of franchises based on pre-existing... well, franchises, really, it should be tough for brand new characters to make any significant impression, but I feel like we've been spoiled for choice in some ways; beyond the five mentioned below, I could've also gone for Y The Last Man's Yorick Brown, Scott Pilgrim's Kim Pine (Because, really, it's all about Kim. Admit it), Fringe's Walter Bishop or Dollhouse's Adelle DeWitt, to name just a few more. I'm not talking about the most important characters of the last ten years, or even the most popular, please understand; this is purely a (selfish and subjective) question of quality, for once. These, however, are my top 5:

Benjamin Linus
Color me one of those people who drifted in and out of Lost throughout the first two seasons of the show... Well, until Ben entered the picture. Michael Emerson's smarmy, knowing performance as "Henry Gale" brought something that the show had needed since the beginning: A Bad Guy. Or, at least, someone who we didn't know much about, but were pretty sure we shouldn't be trusting nonetheless. As we've learned more about the character since then, it's been Emerson's performance that's led the way, convincing us about a control freak who likes to think that he's one step ahead of everyone even though he's lost sight of the bigger picture. In a show filled with great characters - Locke was so close to making my top 5 - Ben stands apart as the best of them all.

Thaddeus S. "Rusty" Venture
Cynical, selfish and entirely delusional when it comes to his importance in the world, The Venture Bros.'s patriarchal figure may be one of the most oddly complex, nuanced character on television these days. On the surface, he's a self-centered coward emotionally scarred from a childhood as a Boy Adventurer who resents his life, his family and pretty much the rest of the world, but the longer the show goes on, the more we see a different Rusty: The father who's grooming Dean in his image - because there's no way that could go wrong - excited about sharing his passion for prog rock and science (and, surprisingly, offering support and advice in times of need), for one thing, or the man who's so pissed off by trouble ruining his plans that he ends up doing heroic deeds just to make his own life easier. Never mind that he's also genius enough to successfully clone his kids for years, replacing them if and when they died... Rusty Venture isn't the kind of man you could rely on, but he certainly makes for entertaining viewing.

Gaius Baltar
And talking of people you can't rely on, Battlestar Galactica's Baltar may have been chosen by God/The Gods/Some Higher Power/Ronald D. Moore to lead humanity towards its new home, along the way discovering a spiritual side, falling in love and growing as a human being, but that wasn't why we loved him so much. No, with Baltar, it was all about the weasel. Whether he was trying to maneuver himself into even greater positions of power, trying to stay alive after surrendering the colonies to the cylons on New Caprica or just trying to seduce whatever character had caught his attentions that week, Baltar was never better than when he was being weak and giving in to his worst impulses. James Callis' performance was one of the best things throughout the entire series, giving us a character that we Loved To Hate To Love, as well as some of the few moments of genuine comedy throughout the entire run. You just know that he'd have given up that whole farming thing within a month of the finale, don't you?

Donna Noble
She didn't fall in love with the Doctor. It's worth repeating: She didn't fall in love with the Doctor. After Rose and Martha, that fact alone made this particular Doctor Who companion feel like a breath of fresh air, but there was so much more to her than that: Her enthusiasm, and heart. Her ability to say the wrong thing in almost any occasion. Her self-confidence, misplacing in many ways, but making her feel like the Doctor's peer and friend instead of someone who believes everything he says and puts him on a pedestal (Catherine Tate deserves all credit for making that charming and irritating at once). Given her (intentionally) annoying first appearance in "The Runaway Bride," it's surprising that Donna turned into the companion I'll miss most from this new run, but it's definitely true; her exit was heartbreaking, entirely fitting and proof that Russell T. Davies loved her too much to kill her off. I'm selfishly hoping she survives "The End Of Time," too.

Kate Kane/Batwoman
Still relatively new, there's something fascinating about DC Comics' latest Batman spin-off. Under writer Greg Rucka's control - and, given her few appearances elsewhere, only under Rucka's control - Kate Kane is at once a reminder of, and refusal of, Bat-cliches. Yes, she was born of family tragedy, but her response wasn't to focus her entire life towards justice, but instead run off the rails in self-destructive behavior. Like Batman, she sees herself as a soldier, but she actually approaches her missions in that mindset, no doubt helped by her father and their shared military background. Most refreshingly, Batwoman is wonderfully fallible - Misunderstanding a prophecy to be about her own death in the recent "Elegy" storyline - and, at times, unlikable. Given her relatively few appearances since her debut in 2006's 52, it's surprising that she comes across as so rounded and real a character, but she does - and we hope her career is as long-lived as her male counterpart.

But enough about our love of Dr. Zachary Smith updates and redheaded women - What're your choices for the character who's made the greatest impression on you after appearing for the first time at some point during the last ten years? The comments are there for a purpose, after all...

The Fiction: The Motorway

In Martha's second trip on the TARDIS in the new Doctor Who, the Doctor takes her to New New York. Much like its present-day namesake, this city is trapped by traffic.

In fact, the only living residents of the city have been stuck in a quagmire called "the Motorway" for decades, all trying to get to a better place. Some even resort to kidnapping so that they can drive in the HOV lanes, which they've heard can cut years off their travel time. Once Martha is kidnapped she finds out they'll make it the ten miles to their destination in a short six years.

The Reality: Traffic and congestion.

It's been said that Americans spend an average of over 100 hours a year commuting, so it's no wonder that scientists are constantly trying to find ways to improve the driving experience. Writers are always imagining new ways for their heroes to get from point A to point B. But how many of those writer's dreams are coming true? Read on.

The fiction: Computer driven cars

Seen in: I, Robot
Pros: You can read, nap, or solve crimes while you're traveling. Accident cleanup is a snap.
Cons: Should the computer system decide to become murderous, you're in a lot of trouble.

The Reality: The Darpa Challenge

(image courtesy of the Team VictorTango website)

DARPA presents prizes to teams creating cars that drive on their own using "various sensors and positioning systems." Their 2007 challenge asked the vehicles to navigate an urban environment and "executing simulated military supply missions while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles." Three and a half million dollars in prizes were awarded and six teams finished the course.

The Fiction: Mag-Lev Cars

Seen In: Minority Report
Pros: You can pave everything and make it a road, giving D.C. residents as many lanes than they could ever want. Pull right up to your 200th floor apartment.
Cons: Imagine an accident at those speeds, on the side of a skyscraper. Makes car chase a lot more dangerous.

The Reality: Mag-Lev trains.

While we haven't started putting mag-lev systems in cars yet, we have put them into trains. Japan has the most famous trains using the technology, where magnets are used to both levitate and propel the train. Using magnetic levitation for travel has a lot of advantages, including speed. Not to mention the potential benefits to the environment, and the noise reduction. As we pointed out earlier, the future of rail transport in the U.S. might very well lie with mag-lev technology.

The Fiction: Flying Cars

Seen In: The Fifth Element, many many others
Pros: No need for roads anymore, the sky is open to everybody.
Cons: The sky is open to everybody. The view becomes nothing but cars, and traffic is a nightmare still.

The Reality: Hovercraft

Vehicles that float on a cushion of air are actually more popular and widely used than most people think. They're good for going over any terrain, and they're used by militaries around the world. It also is the technology on this list that you are most likely to make in your own garage, if all the YouTube videos are any indication. It is unlikely that the flying cars in science fiction are powered by jets of air, but so far it's the closest thing we've got.

The Fiction: Vehicle A.I. that talks to you

Seen in: Knight Rider
Pros: Can let you know when it needs maintenance, keep you entertained on long drives, drive for you if you need to beat up some bad guys.
Cons: Can get a little snippy. Might lock you out.

The Reality: turn by turn GPS, cars that talk to each other

While we're not quite to the point where our vehicles are having conversations, we do have plenty of robotic female voices telling us to "turn left" and after we make a wrong turn, they scold us with a "recalculating." But GPS systems have become commonplace. What's the next frontier of the technology? Cars that converse with each other.

In this video from cNet, we see that systems are being designed where two vehicles will send signals back and forth in order to keep track of their distance from each other, their speeds, and other relevant information. The same system can also get information from stop lights to relay to the driver, letting you know if you really should try to gun through that yellow light, or maybe you should try to stop.

Does it seem like these innovations are too far outside our grasp? Well there are two famous fictional cars that science has managed to replicate, at least to some degree:

The Fiction: The Batmobile

The Reality: Voice recognition software, OnStar, and "the Tumbler."

The Batmobile's features change from model to model, in fact there is even a website devoted solely to tracking the changes in the vehicle. There have been numerous defensive innovations, as well as offensive weaponry installed over the years. While most cars aren't driving around with side-mounted spherical bombs, the Batmobile has long had voice recognition software. Now the Ford Sync system comes standard in many of their models, one of the many ways our cars are starting to obey our vocal commands.

In a set of ads using the Batman/Batman Returns style Batmobile, audiences discovered one feature that they could have installed in their own cars: OnStar. Of course, Batman has had hands free calling to his support network (namely Alfred) for years.

The most important thing to note is that when Christopher Nolan brought his own spin to the Batmobile in Batman Begins, the "Tumbler" was actually a functional vehicle. According to The History of the Batmobile:

"Their primary focus was to make this Batmobile as real as possible: at 9 feet wide and 15 feet long, the car weighed in at 2.5 tons but was still capable of 0-60MPH in under six seconds with a top speed of 110MPH. Thanks to its unique design, it is also capable of making unassisted jumps up to 30 feet."

One of the best car shows in the world, Top Gear, was able to actually have the car in the studio for a segment where they talk about its actual working features. There's a rumor that The Stig even took it on a lap around the track:

The Fiction: James Bond's Scuba Car from "The Spy Who Loved Me."

The Reality: The sQuba Submarine Car

James Bond was able to tool around underwater in a modified Lotus Espirit without getting his impeccable suit damp. The sQuba Submarine Car is not quite so watertight, but it still is a car that handily swims around underwater, just like the vehicle in the film. As Jalopnik reports:

"Though you're not going to stay dry if you want to go diving, because theres no airtight canopy to enclose you. To breathe, you'll have to wear a scuba mask connected to the car's integrated compressed-air tank. But who cares?! This is a car that goes underwater!"

You can read a complete write up of the car here.

See the car in action and learn about all its other features:

Since the sQuba is just a concept car at the moment, if you want a car that will travel land and water, you might have to settle for an amphibious car. In one of their most infamous segments, the gentlemen at Top Gear were challenged to make their own amphibious cars, and then cross the English Channel. You might be surprised at the results:

What's next in the future of transportation? The best place to find out is probably the science-fiction section of Netflix.

As we all know, Batman's alleged death in DC's big Final Crisis series actually just saw him dumped amongst cavemen with his trusty utility belt, while Dick Grayson took over the cape and cowl in current times. But today's announcement of the six-issue Return series shows that getting him back to the future is going to require a lot of pitstops - and alternate Batman costumes. Writer Grant Morrison explains:

The first episode is set in the Late-Paleolithic Era, the second is in Pilgrim-era Gotham Village, and we also get to see Gotham in Western or noir style. Each of the stories is a twist on a different "pulp hero" genre - so there's the caveman story, the witchhunter/Puritan adventurer thing, the pirate Batman, the cowboy, the P.I. - as a nod toward those mad old 1950s comics with Caveman Batman and Viking Batman adventures. It's Bruce Wayne's ultimate challenge... So far I've had him overcome the Devil, Madness and Death; now we see him, truly lost, amnesiac, and stripped down to basic human survival mode in some extremely hostile environments and unfamiliar situations. He's the best fighter in his world, he's one of the smartest and most driven men who ever lived, but we've seen him outwit the Joker 10,000 times. This was a way of taking the character off the grid, as they say, and reminding readers what kind of man he is and what he's capable of. If you wonder why Batman is so cool - here's why Batman is so cool.

With each issue illustrated by a different artist, The Return Of Bruce Wayne is set to launch in April next year. We were sold as soon as we saw those costumes. Is it too late to lobby for 1980s New Wave Dandy Batman?

Grant Morrison on return of original Batman [USA Today]

Morgan Freeman sat down with MTV and told them that there is no way Chris Nolan would walk away from the Batman series. Saying, "I know-I just know-that Chris is working on number three," Morgan Freeman told MTV News. "He couldn't possibly not be."

So who does Freeman dream of as the next Nolan villain, Catwoman. So do we Morgan, so do we.

In other Dark Knight news check out this hilarious plot hole song that points out the few problems and questions many folks had with the beloved film.