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.