Over at Borders' blog Babel Clash, Adams explains exactly how Lightspeed will differ from existing SF magazines. For one thing it'll publish only SF, no fantasy. But unlike other SF-only venues, it'll publish all SF, not just near-future stories. Another difference: Lightspeed will publish a 50-50 mix of reprints and original stories, because Adams figures its target audience is general readers, who haven't already read everything out there. Adds Adams:

[S]ince we're targeting new or casual readers of short fiction or science fiction in general, part of the reason for mixing the reprints and originals is to show them where science fiction comes from, where it is now, and where it's going.

And finally, the magazine's fiction and non-fiction will go together, so if there's a short story about robots, there'll be an article about famous robots from SF, or comparing Optimus Prime to Mechagodzilla.

Meanwhile, Lightspeed will also have its own unique revenue model, including advertising but also a monthly ebook edition that you can subscribe to. The ebook edition will have the following month's content all at once, so there's no waiting for the site to update twice a week. Adds Adams:

Other than that, we'll be experimenting with and exploring the possibilities of various new media like iPhone apps, and podcasts (which may not be a money-making venture, but can help us broaden our reach). Although there will be no print edition of Lightspeed, we will not be ignoring traditional media altogether; once a year we'll be publishing a Lightspeed anthology, which will collect all of the fiction that appeared in the magazine over the course of a calendar year.

With print magazines continuing to struggle and webzines having a hard time breaking out of the pack, here's hoping a more defined focus and some new revenue models will help magazine-publishing in general. Here's hoping.

I say "anti-villainy", because you'd be hard-pressed to find a single hero in any of the six parts that make up Incognito. There's a protagonist, one Zack Overkill, who was once a super-strong villain but is now a heavily drugged civilian in the Witness Protection Program. He occasionally does the right thing, but never for the right reasons, and there are one or two truly unforgivable acts he commits along the way. Even the so-called good guys of this world, the SOS, are a morally gray, clandestine bunch who only recently stopped torturing their prisoners.

Brubaker chose to spin the universe of Incognito out of the pulp tradition of the 1930's, which is part of the reason this is now such a brutal world. As he argues in the collection's afterword, characters like Doc Savage and the Shadow were always more violent and ambiguous than the likes of Captain America and Superman, and the larger world of the pulps was one dominated by horror and noirish murder mystery.

Considering this background of pulpish adventurers and the current war between the omnipresent, villainous organization run by the Black Death and the heroic-by-default SOS, I couldn't help but be reminded of The Venture Bros. (There's another plot point that will really hammer home that connection, but I won't spoil it.) The comparison is a worthy one - both are superior explorations of how supposedly extraordinary people try but fail to lead ordinary lives, and the consequences of secret wars between good and evil for those caught in the middle. Oh, and they're both fantastic, if you prefer to keep things simple.

Between Sleeper and his truly epic run on Captain America, I'd rank Ed Brubaker as one of the top three writers working in comics today. After reading Incognito, you could definitely talk me into handing him the outright title. What's so impressive about his work here is that the story is grim, gritty, profane, ultraviolent, and more than a little offensive - and none of it feels gratuitous. He is telling a story from the perspective of a man without a moral compass, and there's no way such a story isn't headed for some pretty dark places. Still, because neither he nor Zack Overkill revel in it, all of the carnage feels artistically justified. Take note, comic book writers from the nineties. This is how mature comics writing is done.

At just six issues, the story barrels along quickly. Although the concept of a supervillian working an office job while in witness protection was the initial impetus for Incognito, Brubaker does not dwell on it for too long. He extracts a lot of great material from the premise - including Zack's one civilian friend and his rather inexplicable office crush - but puts a lot of other balls in motion while he does so. With at least five or six factions out for Zack, each with their own distinct interests, it's remarkable that the story is entirely coherent. Of course, based on Brubaker's track record, it's not exactly surprising.

Sean Phillips also deserves a great deal of praise for his work on the art of Incognito. A perfect visual fit for Brubaker's writing, he excels at bringing out the twisted, complex emotions of the book's characters. Although clearly capable of rendering an exploded head or charred corpse in all its exquisite glory, he too shows restraint, preferring to indicate the most horrific moments tastefully, rather than let them take over the panels. That isn't to say there isn't some brutal imagery in here - there definitely is - but much like Brubaker's script, none of it feels exploitative or gratuitous.

Incognito sets out to explore one possible fate of a supervillain and ends up tackling questions of morality, destiny, voyeurism, and whether there are limits to what humans can do to themselves in the name of power. It also takes the story of Zack Overkill and uses it as an opportunity to construct an entire world of pulp heroes and villains brought forward into the 21st century, one that Brubaker has promised he will return to. I can't wait.

The G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra movie novelization, by Max Allan Collins, is coming out, and one fan at General's Joes was lucky enough to snag an early copy (at Target no less). We rounded up the most important spoilers and reveals, which we can generally assume will be in the movie, as these books are usually a translation of the script itself.

First up everything is shiny and new. We live in an international world after all. No more dirty Vietnam War-esque Joes: these Joes are from around the world, which explains why Heavy Duty is British, Cover Girl is Czech, Breaker is Moroccan and the Pit is in Egypt. And since it's set in a hype modern "We Are The World" future, that means more room for gadgetry, says the fan reviewer:

It has a bunch of sci-fi gadgets in it like holograms, accelerator suits, jetpacks, invisibility suits, pulse rifles, nano-mites, brain downloading, robotic "spy fish", mind control, and lasers.

That's a lot of tech stuff, but more on the nano-mites later...

So what was good about GI Joe? Not surprisingly, the fan loved Destro, who is being played by Christopher Eccleston, so let's go ahead and assume that this part is in the bag. Destro and MARS are the big villains, and COBRA only shows up at the end, to make it seem more menacing and awesome. And instead of the Cobra Commander, we get a new character, Rex aka the Doctor, who is described in the novel as "Lord Byron as mad scientist." (???). He eventually becomes the Commander, and at the end of the book, the Commander sticks it to McCullen aka Destro, turning him into the villain we all know and love.

The reviewer goes on to describe General Hawk as "pretty awesome," which is how I would picture him, I guess. But just how awesome is he? Star Wars Prequels "awesome"? Because that's how nervous I am right now about this film.

Other good things? In the book (and probably in the script), the Joes poke fun at their accelerator suits calling them, "hi-tech football pads or Japanese robots," and this was probably written BEFORE they saw the CG horror that are these suits on screen. So the film-makers set out to make them look like hell? This kind of self-awareness is not a good thing.

The book is supposedly rife with a few sad puns and bad jokes. Like Marlon Wayans talking about "kung-fu grip." The Joes regularly shout "Yo Joe!" and in one scene, "Go Joe!" But this is an action movie after all, and those moments are actually important, so I don't see that as a negative. They insist that the shape shifting Zartan is to be taken seriously — and he actually takes the place of a big character in the end, thus setting up an even bigger role for him in the sequel. We're guessing it has something to do with the next big reveal... which is the death of a "code name" Joe during the big action sequence at The Pit. (Apparently it's someone who will only get one action figure.)

There are four big action sequences: a convoy attack at the start of the movie, an attack on The Pit, the Paris sequence with the nano-mites attacking the Eiffel Tower, and the final battle at the underwater MARS facility.)

Now for the really bad, according to the review. The Nano-mites, which you've seen eating up the Eiffel Tower in past trailers can do anything, "mind control, eating metal, shapchanging, Destro's mask, super soldiers, you name it…they can do it!" Which sounds like the world's laziest writing tool ever.

Also my beloved foot-soldier Neo-Vipers are all a bunch of mindless drones that can apparently DISSOLVE? No, that's just not okay. I can understand just making them robot-y nothings, but giving them the ability to dissolve? Yechh, no.

This really sounds like a jumble of bad with light helpings of good on the side. Let's hope Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Eccleston can pull it off, because it sounds like there is a lot going on.

GI Joe The Rise of Cobra will be in theaters August 7th.

1950s and 1960s:
Space vessel design in the actual Space Age tends to involve either sleek rockets or funny flying saucers — until Star Trek comes along, with the U.S.S. Enterprise's weird mix of saucer and rocket-like nacelles, bonded to a tuber shaped main section. Not to mention the fierceness of the Romulan warbird and the gun-like Klingon warships. Model design is already starting to change drastically:

1968 to 1977:

And then with 2001: A Space Odyssey, you start seeing more rugged, lived-in-looking ships, with weirder shapes, like the probe's long neck and rounded front. And ships start having more bumpy weird bits. This trend only continues with Space: 1999's squat Eagles, which look like they could survive anything (even blowing up multiple times) but aren't as elegant as an old-school rocket.

1977 to 1986:

And then Star Wars comes along, with its awesome space dogfights, and suddenly, hugeness and imposing scope are a must. It's no accident that later iterations of the U.S.S. Enterprise are way huger than the 1960s original. The crazy shapes of the T.I.E. fighters and other craft inspire some other weird models in things like The Black Hole. And the X-Wing fighters inspire everything from Buck Rogers' fighter ship to the Last Star Fighter's vessel.

1987 to 1997:

Star Trek: The Next Generation saw in a whole new era of space opera, but the main thing that changed in the late 1980s was the rise of CG effects, allowing spaceships to look much more diverse and weirder than models ever could. From the Borg cube to the many bizarre shapes of vessels in Babylon 5, starships no longer had to look like a few pieces stuck together.

1998 to present:

I can't think of one defining franchise of the past decade that has shaped how we view space opera the same way these earlier franchises did. Star Trek has kept innovating, but so have BSG, Farscape, Stargate and a number of others. CG has gotten a lot smoother and ships can move in much more natural, organic ways — just look at the Narada, to bring us back to our first example. At the same time, as nostalgia has reigned the genre, we've come full circle and resurrected a lot of classic designs, with a few tweaks.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

Ahead of tomorrow's Free Comic Book Day, iVerse have just released a free Comic Shop Locator for iPhone application (which connects to the much-referenced Comic Shop Locator database), allowing you to find the closest store to your current location at the touch of a screen. The app is free, and available from the iTunes store now.

Here's a snippet from the story's opening:

We stood on a hill overlooking the meadow. A bunch of other kids ambled behind us, rags and bones, scruffy faces, some little ones on the shoulders of the bigger. Bit by bit, as Uxo and the damn machine cleared the meadow, we'd advance to the new safe zone for a better look.

It was a comical sight, if not for the stakes: Volkovoy, dull gray heap, like a breaching whale, trundled and pivoted, roared and smoked, extruding claws and spades and hammers. It plowed up the sod. Now and then, if it couldn't defuse a dinger, Volkovoy flashed and shook, encasing and detonating the thing, then dropping it out the back, busted metal dung. Meanwhile, Uxo, sweetie, his tail curled back like the tongue of a letter "Q," walked and sniffed and walked. His smart flat face was matted and dirty, but when he yipped and looked back at me and the kids - "A bomb here, boss!" he seemed to say. "Look how good I am!" - his eyes were full of light. Then I'd tiptoe out to fetch the dinger and disable it. He knew not to lick me then.

The whole story is free online. Check it out. Photograph by Sarah Pickering.

"Uxo, Bomb Dog" [via Futurismic]

• David (Davy throughout most of the book) is 17 when he starts teleporting, and 19 when the book ends. In the movie, he goes from age 15 at first teleport, to 25 in the blink of an eye. So much for those formative years.
• There's a lot of clumsy dialogue in the book. It was Gould's first novel, which could account for some of it, but when Davy gets asked he doesn't want to dance with a hoochie mama at a college party, his response makes us cringe: "I feel foolish. You know what you're doing out there. I feel like a clumsy jerk. The contrast is painful. I'm shallow, I guess, but I don't want everybody to know just how shallow."
• Davy may be young in the novel, but he starts dating Millie who attends college in Oklahoma pretty easily, despite their age difference. In the movie, she's a childhood friend who dates the Flash Thompson jock-type asshole. Shades of Mary Jane and Spidey.
• When he needs to kill time in the book, Davy jumps to Disney World and hops on the attractions. Star Tours is his favorite. In the movie, Davy kills time by boning bar floozies, surfing, and having lunch on the head of the Sphinx.
• In the movie, David robs a series of banks and other locations to finance his free-wheeling lifestyle, but in the book he only robs one bank, which nets him close to a million dollars. He lives fairly frugally off of it, since he has close to 800k left near the end of the book.
• David lives in a sleek highrise in the movie, but in the book he has a fairly modest apartment tucked away in a ghetto. He's put in a secret closet to hide his money, and Gould perpetually mentions his "25 inch television." We're assuming that in 1992 that was considered "big."
• In the novel, David jumps to the Stanville Library during his first couple of teleports, but Davy continually returns here throughout the novel where it serves as his "safe" place that he'll revert back to when in danger.
• There are no jumpscars or miniature sonic booms when Davy teleports in the book, unlike the movie. In fact, he doesn't make a sound at all when he leaves. Millie videotapes him doing it, and they have to slow the tape down to frame by frame to even see anything happening. At that point, you can vaguely see through him and into wherever he's going to or coming from, but only for a single frame. Having said that, the visual effects of jumping in the movie were pretty damned awesome.
• He also doesn't carry his momentum with him when he teleports in the novel. In the movie, he'd stay fairly within the laws of physics and stay in motion, but the book nullifies that. In fact, he steps off of many ledges, plummets down, and will jump away just before hitting bottom without any ill effects.
• Davy is the only jumper in the novel, whereas in the movie we're shown at least three of them. Including one with much more skill than David has.
• In the movie a group of mysterious agents called Paladins are tracking the jumpers, but in the book it's just the NSA.
• In the movie the Paladins use devices called "tethers" that utilize electrical shocks and pulses to keep a jumper pinned down. In the novel, they try tranquilizer darts and homing harpoons.
• David's swank apartment is nice in the movie, but in the book once Davy is found out, he builds a remote hideaway in a rocky fortress of solitude in Texas. It's completely walled off and looks like a part of a rock formation.
• In the book, Millie trains Davy to jump to the emergency room whenever she says "Bang," in an effort to keep him from getting seriously hurt. He has to jump whenever she says it, even if he's naked or going to the bathroom. Talk about cruel tricks being played on you by your girlriend.
• In both the novel and the movie, Davy and David record "jumpsites" by physically visiting places. They can't just look at a photo and teleport until they've actually been to the place. David in the movie prefers acres of photos, but Davy uses racks of videotapes. Novel Davy can also spot a place using binoculars, and then immediately jump there.
• Davy's mom leaves in the book, just like in the movie, but it's only to get away from Davy's abusive father. Shortly after Davy reunites with her, she's blown up by a terrorist on a hijacked flight. Davy soon devotes all of his efforts to avenging her death.
• Novel Davy is much less of a pussy then Movie David, breaking terrorist's bones and dropping them off of ledges into a pit filled with water. However, he cries at the drop of a hat. Hayden-bot probably has no tear glands.
• I cannot fucking stand the covers of mass-market movie tie in paperback books. I know the marketing department wants people to go "Oooooh! Bruce Willis is on this cover! Bruce Willis must be in this book!" and buy it, but I can't stand movie covers on my books. I bought this in the lame-o Christensen on the Sphinx cover, but then found the older copy and traded it in later. Phew. How's that for trivia?
• If you enjoyed (or think you might enjoy) the novel Jumper, then check out Fade by Robert Cormier. It's about a boy who discovers he can turn himself invisible. Sweet!

Rossen took what was a cover story at Wizard Magazine about the problematic history of making a new Superman movie into a fully fleshed-out book that includes interviews and anecdotes with just about everyone that was involved with the Superman franchise over the years. Sure, the common knowledge stuff about producer Jon Peters wanting writer Kevin Smith to give Lex Luthor a gay alien dog is in here, but there's a ton of new information in here as well, like the details about a non-sucky version of Superman III that never happened.

Plus, can you imagine Neil Diamond as Superman? It almost happened. Sweet Kryptonite, bad times never felt so good. I'm still in the middle of this one, so if it turns out worse than Superman IV, try and find the forgiving circuits in your brain. However, it gets harder and harder to put down so I doubt that will happen. Pick up a copy tomorrow during new comics day, and weep for what almost could have been.

What is it with kids and dimension-hopping portals? The kids in C.S. Lewis' books couldn't stay out of the damn wardrobe that wormholed them to Narnia, and if you haven't read Julie Andrews' The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles about kids who are trained by a professor to flip their minds into an alternate universe, then you're missing out. And of course Lyra in The Golden Compass is on her way to meet her dad — and go with him to another dimension.

It may be jumping on the dimension-hopping bandwagon, but Coraline looks gorgeous, though. We've grown so tired of seeing everything turned into CGI explosion-fests that a film featuring stop-motion animation is a welcome throwback. Henry Selick, who did such a great job with The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach handles the directing, based on Gaiman's novel.

In Saving Charlie, fans will discover why Hiro has gotten more action on the show than the hormonal Peter Petrelli. The plot features Hiro's missing six month time-travel adventure with Charlie the cute waitress, when he went into the past to try and save her from Sylar. While he ultimately had to let her die in one of those "it was meant to be" moments, they did fall in love.

The novel is being put out by Del Rey Publishing, and is written by Aury Wellington, who seems to be best-known for her novelizations of teen angst drama The O.C. . It also features one of the dullest book covers we've ever seen. But we're trying not to judge. We need our Heroes fix.

Lefty videoblogger Jimmy Burns is doing a video podcast about the evils of corporate American when the Starbucks behind him explodes. A cable news channel scoops up his feed and stars airing it live, and he instantly becomes a global celebrity. Global News sends him to Iraq, where soldiers are searching for President McCain's son. Burns struggles with becoming a whore for the mainstream media and the U.S. army. But then a new radical Islamic terrorist group starts using Burns for its own ends as well.

(Weirdly enough, the McCain for President campaign is advertising on the Shooting War site, even though the comic depicts a John McCain presidency as an unparalleled catastrophe. I kept wondering if this was a joke, but it isn't.)

Shooting War reads like writer Anthony Lappé's love letter to old-school broadcast news, which no longer exists in 2011. Lappé runs the lefty Guerilla News Network and worked on a Showtime documentary about Iraq. In the graphic novel, the cable news networks are shallow and evil, and Dan Rather haunts the book like the ghost of responsible journalism. (The Shooting War website says the book version features, "by popular demand, more Dan Rather than you can shake a dead armadillo at.") So somebody must have really liked the Dan Rather cameos, which now seem a bit excessive and hagio(porno)graphic.

The Iraq war, meanwhile, has spawned terrorist attacks all over the U.S. and Europe, plus a suitcase nuke in India. The comic's worst case scenario presumes super-competent terrorists, but still seems freakily plausible.

One major improvement in Shooting War's book version is Dan Goldman's art, which no longer has to fit into a series of oblong rectangles. The mixture of photos, painting and drawing looks a lot more natural on the page, and the edits give more of a movie-like flow to the narrative.

The main weakness of Shooting War is its preachiness. You'll want to skim some of the long speeches that Lappé puts into the mouths of his characters. In particular, the leader of terrorist group Sword of Mohammed spews out a mixture of ideology and infodump that fills a few pages with word balloons. It feels like the mistake of a rookie graphic novel writer, who's more used to writing pure prose.

But Shooting War is lurid and clever enough that you almost forget it's a political screed written by a documentary film-maker. You can just enjoy the dystopian future porn and ignore the political messages, although you may find yourself thinking about them later.