In Xombie, a zombie named Dirge has somehow managed to retain his human consciousness, though not his memories, and tries to live a quietly life with his undead dog Cerberus until he eventually decays into oblivion. But when a human girl, Zoe, falls from a helicopter into zombie-infested territory, Dirge takes it upon himself to perform one last good deed before he falls apart and guide her to the city of human survivors. The task puts them both in the path of a millennia-old Egyptian mummy woman and a reanimated Velociraptor. Xombie creator James Farr began the story as an online Flash cartoon, then penned a comic book sequel, Xombie: Reanimated.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Farr, a homicide detective, is currently in negotiations with DreamWorks for the rights to Xombie, with Kurtzman and Orci in talks in produce. No word yet on whether the pair could write the screenplay as well, nor whether the planned adaptation would be animated or live-action.

'Xombie' getting the Kurtzman/Orci treatment at DreamWorks [The Hollywood Reporter]
[Xombie Online]

The cover for this special North American-only version of the game — which will also include a print of the artwork and "exclusive video content" — was created by fan-favorite comic book artist Alex Ross, painter of Marvels and Kingdom Come. Kotaku has video of Ross creating the cover, giving you the chance to be impressed and confused by his method (Seriously, why does he do everything in black ink first if he's just going to paint over it anyway?). Alternatively, you can just spend as much time as we have nitpicking what's going on with the DC heroes' outfits — What's going on with Green Lantern's shoulder padding? What's with the Flash's armbands? Is that the post-Flash: Rebirth costume (in which case, which Flash is that?)?

In case you're as anal as we are about these things, Comic Book Resources are reporting that DC will publish a tie-in comic that leads into the game's release, as created by Mortal Kombat co-creator John Tobias. Crisis On Infinite Modes, anyone?

Beater wrote to us about CrappyCat, saying simply:

Join CrappyCat in his abnormal journey to the bottom of a bottle and into another dimension.

Part of this abnormal journey involves fighting multiple Darths who swing out of the sky. I love the way the art in this game looks like a cross between Kid Robot and Mike "Hellboy" Mignola. The piles of skulls are lovely, as are all the interactive monsters.

If you need to kill a few minutes today in monstery bliss, visit the interactive adventures of CrappyCat.

CrappyCat [via CrappyCat]

DC's big releases of the week are probably Countdown: Arena, which is much more fun than any comic with no plot and ugly art has any right to be (I'm not joking about the lack of plot; here's literally everything that happens in it: Three different versions of many DC superheroes have to fight each other or be killed. The end.), and The Flash: The Wild Wests, in which writer Mark Waid tried his hardest to recast the Fastest Man Alive as the father in a superhero sitcom family with varying results (The first issues are by far the best, not only because of the way in which the story peters out by the end, but also because Daniel Acuna's art is a beautiful thing to behold); much more worthwhile, though, is Dark Horse's The Mask Omnibus, Vol. 1, which will remind all who have forgotten that there was always more to the tale of the magical green mask than either Jim Carrey or Jamie Kennedy could ever hope to relate to moviegoing audiences.

The independent publishers seem to have sensed weakness from the majors, with IDW releasing the beautiful and nonsensical-in-the-best-way Complete Zombies Vs. Robots collection for just $24.99 (the cheapest way to read about the undead fighting the mechanically-living while also taking on Amazons and also a giant squid or two that you can find, I believe) and Devil's Due releasing the 99-cent preview issue of Heroes' Milo Ventimiglia's new comic, Rest. But both of these valiant efforts for variation are likely to be crushed by the sales behemoth that is Marvel Comics' Spider-Man, which tries to take over your local retailer with three different titles this week.

In preparation for the apparently-upcoming movie, Venom: Dark Origin launches its six-issue-run, telling the apparently ill-lit beginnings of Spider-Man's alien, while much happier times can be found in the King-Size Spider-Man Summer Special, which hopefully includes ol' webhead getting ginchy on the beach with Annette and Frankie with a title like that. And if both of those aren't enough spider-action for you, then there's always the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man Family, where - I swear to you this is true - there's a strip called Mr. And Mrs. Spider-Man about Peter and Mary-Jane being married and preparing to have a kid. Who could resist?
(Just in case you can resist, Marvel is actually putting out something that has nothing to do with their favorite franchise this week: NYX: No Way Home revives the "gutterpunk" version of the X-Men from a few years back, with novelist Marjorie Liu getting rid of the teenage prostitute and focusing on a more YA-friendly direction.)

As is the case each and every week of each and every year, the full list of this week's releases can be found here, with the whereabouts of your local comic book store being found here. Just make sure to support your local Spider-Man while you're there; that guy really doesn't get enough attention.

The above clip also showcases one of the biggest challenges of doing a super-team movie or TV show properly: shoehorning in everybody's origins and explaining how all these random people got together. Justice League gets around this problem by making the Martian Manhunter into the Charlie, and all of the other Leaguers into his Angels. Sadly, J'onn J'onnz, Manhunter from Mars, is also kind of a dick, judging from the way he introduces himself to Tori disguised as her creepy coworker who's actually a supervillain.

I wanted to find a clip of the League doing something superheroic and using their powers in an awesome way, but sadly that doesn't really happen in Justice League. The TV movie's big final set piece consists of Green Lantern incompetently confronting the arch-villain, the Weatherman, and failing to prevent him from activating his weather disaster machine. And then the Flash incompetently carries a few kids to safety, but fails to take them far enough. And Tori, who's been pretty useless up until this point, finally stops the Weather Man's destructive tidal wave by freezing it with her ice powers. And Green Lantern, maybe overcompensating for his total failure a few moments earlier, makes a dumb crack about how the Weatherman is always wrong.

As dull as many superhero movies have been since Sam Raimi and Chris Nolan made the genre viable again, it's good to remember how dire they really were, back in the nadir of the Joel Schumacher era.

Spider-Man: The original bad luck hero, Peter Parker knows what it's like to be single and unloved. Admittedly, that's only because the devil came and magic-ed away his marriage to hot supermodel-turned-actress Mary Jane Watson, but it still counts, right? Even before that happened, though, he wasn't having much success at the whole relationship thing. His first love of his life, Gwen Stacy? Thrown off the George Washington Bridge by the Green Goblin just to piss Spider-Man off. Even nowadays, the newly-single swinger still can't catch a break - his new potential girlfriend, Carlie Cooper, is an NYPD forensic expert who's working on a case that has Spider-Man as murder suspect number one.

Cyclops: Pity poor Scott "Slim" Summers. Being the stoic leader of the X-Men doesn't make you exceptionally easy to date, if his experience is anything to go by. If it's not your first girlfriend sacrificing herself for the good of the universe on the surface of the moon, it's your first wife being revealed to be a clone of said girlfriend created by a bad guy to mess with your head and, oh, by the way, your girlfriend isn't actually dead after all - that was another clone, albeit a cosmic one - and your wife is actually a Goblin Queen who wants to kill your baby son as well as a clone. Even after he sorted that mess out (the clone wife was quickly dispatched, and he married the not-dead girlfriend instead), things didn't get any easier. Failing to make his marriage work, he had a psychic affair with the X-Men's resident evil bitch telepath before his wife died again, only for real this time. Sure, now he seems happy enough with his new girlfriend (that would be the evil bitch telepath), but you know that it's only a matter of time before she betrays him and/or his first girlfriend/second wife is revealed not to have died this time, either.

Note: That first girlfriend/second wife, Jean Grey? Apparently so hot that even Professor X was in love with her, as this panel from the original '60s X-Men run shows:

The Flash: Police Scientist and Fastest Man Alive Barry Allen lived a life of speedy misery. Not only was his first wife, Iris, killed by his arch-nemesis Professor Zoom — probably in some kind of rage over the lameness of his name — but when he was preparing to marry a second wife, Zoom attempted the same trick again. This time around, things didn't go to plan; in preventing his fiancee's murder, Allen accidentally killed Zoom. And his appearance as the Flash and lack of appearance as Barry Allen led his fiancee to think that she'd been stood up at the altar, which drove her insane (Hey, some people take rejection really badly). There was light at the end of the tunnel, however, when Allen discovered that Iris hadn't been completely killed after all 00 Sensing a theme here? — but instead just spirited away to the 30th century, where technology had given her a new body. Only problem was, when Allen travelled to the future to be with her, he ended up being captured and tortured by a villain out to destroy all of existence. Trying to save the day one more time somewhat backfired, and Allen died in the attempt, leaving Iris to travel back to the 20th century and write a tell-all book about Allen before failing to prevent the death of another Flash, Bart Allen, years later. She was kind of a jinx, really.

The moral of these stories? You really don't want to be the partner of a superhero, because you'll probably be killed or have the devil rewrite your history at some point or another. But, on the plus side, if you do die? Chances are you'll come back to life before too long. So it's not all bad news, I suppose.

When you were young, did any particular science fiction inspire you to get into writing?

I'm sort of embarrassed to say... well, I'll just lay all my cards on the table here: Isaac Asimov's stuff. Isaac Asimov's science fiction stuff which was, in retrospect, is juvenile and clunky and has much better ideas than style. But, I didn't care about style then I was 12 years old. The cleverness of the mysteries, they don't hold up very well for me as an adult, but as a kid that's the stuff that sparked my imagination.

Do you have a favorite science fiction book of a film?

I honestly think that, even though this is fairly recent, The Matrix was the greatest science fiction movie I've ever seen, and I've seen them all.

Did you like all three?

The other two made my head hurt. I went in cold not knowing anything, completely cold, and it just blew my mind. Going back, I'm a big fan of Phillip K. Dick. Always have been. I'm a big fan of Alfred Bester, and I know a lot of his stuff is out of print now, which kills me. Those formative guys from the 50s and 60s, and any of those guys that Harlan assembled for Dangerous Visions, J.G. Ballard... all those guys are just phenomenal.

And Alfred Bester wrote for comics too, right? Didn't he write Green Lantern?

That's right, he wrote Green Lantern for awhile. He did some pulp stuff before the comics, but he didn't really become big until the 40s and 50s during his run in comics.

What are you writing these days?

I'm currently writing The Brave and the Bold at DC Comics, where I just finished up a run on The Flash. I'm also doing a lot of work at Boom! Studios where I'm the editor in chief.

That's right, and they're based out here in Los Angeles. What titles have you worked on there?

I wrote a miniseries called Potter's Field which came out last year, and I'm working on some more creator-owned stuff for them next year. In the meantime, that's my night job. My day job is the full-time editorial gig. I started there in July of last year, and I couldn't be happier. It's after 20 years of writing, it's cool to flex different muscles editorially because I'm finding that while I'm teaching new writers to do their stuff, it's forcing me to flex muscles that I hadn't used for awhile. Or to sort of articulate things in a way that I only know instinctively.

So were you a fan of Y: The Last Man?

Absolutely! I've been reading Y since the beginning, ever since Brian was a little kid with a stick and a hoop and a crown hat coming by my house going, "Mr. Waid! Mr. Waid! I want to grow up to be just like you!' No, I've known Brian for 10 years or better, and I've been reading his stuff all along. I couldn't be happier for him.

So you follow his work on Lost?

Definitely, and although I know it's a big room with a big group of writers, I can sometimes see flashes of Brian every now and again with the humor.

Do you think anyone could do a good film or television version of Y: The Last Man?

I think if they took enough time with it they could, if they didn't try to cram it into a 90 minute movie, sure. But we'll see... it doesn't matter whether it's faithful, it just matters if it's good or not.

What upcoming comic book films are you looking the most forward to?

Well, Dark Knight. That's the one that's going to rock the house. That's the one that's going to be amazing. Iron Man looks cool, but I was never a huge Iron Man fan, although it's inspired casting. Perfect casting. But Dark Knight... if they can get under the eclipse of the Heath Ledger story, will do really well for them. What I've seen ahead of time looks phenomenal. I just don't think you can say "Why So Serious?" anymore.

Is there any comic book property that you haven't worked on, but would love to?

From Archie Comics to DC Comics to Marvel Comics, I've written pretty much everything, but the one thing I haven't touched is Captain Marvel, the Shazam! version. Some day, at some point in my future, that's somewhere on the line.

Everybody who gets their hooks into it knows it's a great property, it's just that nobody has found a way to translate it. I don't know that you can write it for 40 year old fanboys, I don't know that there's an audience for it there. But it's the perfect young adult property, and it's just waiting to break out. He doesn't have to come from Krypton, and he doesn't have to train for years and years or become a scientist, he just says a magic word. When I was a kid, that's all I wanted.

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• The Guardian from Star Trek: In "City on the Edge of Forever," Kirk and Spock had to hop through a giant talking stone donut in order to follow a crazy Bones back into the Great Depression. Bones had a fever and a bad skin rash, Spock had to work in a soup kitchen and build a device in what little spare time he had, while Kirk spent all his time wooing Joan Collins. Later, they were able to hop safely back through. If that's not easy time travel, then I don't know what is.
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• The Omni from Voyagers!: Voyagers! ran on NBC from 1982 to 1983, and featured the awesome pocket-watch sized Omni as one of the coolest time travel devices ever. It had a miniature scale model of the earth inside, and red and green lights that would tell you if time was "flowing normally" or if it had been disturbed. You would spin the dials and set it (and forget it) and travel back to any time you wanted, which usually just happened to involve temporal anomalies involving famous people.
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• The Flash's Cosmic Treadmill: Barry Allen decided he wanted to check out time travel, so he invented a treadmill that ran (zing!) on cosmic rays. A speedster could set it to a specific time, either forwards or backwards, and then run on the treadmill until it sent him back to that time. Get this, they stayed in that time by "maintaining his internal vibration" that was specific to that time travel. Talk about working overtime. Later Wally West discovered he could time travel without the treadmill, but nothing really beats putting the word "cosmic" in front of something. If only he'd invented the cosmic ab-cruncher and cosmic stairmaster.
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• Dr. Evil's Time Warp Machine from Austin Powers 2: This is from the category of time machine where they never even attempt to explain to you why or how it works, it just does. Which is how all evil genius machines should work. Who needs all that explanation about tachyons and the space-time continuum and all that? Plus it had a psychedelic look and feel to it as well. You just run up to it and throw yourself on it like a velcro wall, and you pop out in the appropriate time... as long as they have another time machine on the other end, apparently. Granted, Austin's own new Volkswagen bug time machine might have looked cool, but that was just a Delorean ripoff.
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• Doctor Doom's Time Platform: Not to be outdone by all the time travel going on in the DC universe, where it seemed like if Superman sneezed he'd end up in the 1800s, Marvel had their own action happening with Doom and his time machine. Doom never really got enough credit, building working Doombots, devices that gave people superpowers, creating massive weapons and all that jazz. Maybe because he was too whiny and bitchy when it came to the Fantastic Four. Anyhow, his time machine was a platform that you'd stand on, wank with some controls, and then you'd be sent back in time, no problem! Why he never conquered the damn world with this thing I'll never know.
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• The Time Traveling Roller Coaster Ride from Timecop: In this Jean Claude Van Damme flick, you hopped into what looked like an amusement park ride, and got blasted towards a wall that you hoped would open up into a time-portal before you got smushed into jelly. It uses the whole "acceleration as time travel" idea, but really does it in style. We just wish there would have a been a "You Must Be This HIgh To Ride This Ride" sign next to Van Damme. Or at least someone asking for his e-ticket.
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• The Timespheres from Terminator: They weren't the most practical devices, because when you were sent back through them they burned off all your clothes. Meaning you couldn't be sent backwards or forwards into a heavily populated area unless you didn't mind everyone seeing your junk. Now, don't ask us how they can send machines back in time as long as they're covered with skin. It boggles our mind too.
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• The penny from Somewhere in Time: Christopher Reeve learned how to travel back in time from 1980 to 1912 in order to be with Jane Seymour, who he's fallen in love with from staring at old photographs of her. Yes, it's corny, we know it. But when he finds a Lincoln penny from 1979 in his pocket and zaps back to the future, even you might admit you have feelings, you robots. It was based on the novel Bid Time Return by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson, and is Reeve's best-known film outside of the Superman series.
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• Uncle Rico's Time Machine from Napoleon Dynamite: Sure, it didn't work and it appeared to only make your testicles hurt (no idea what it did to women), but you had to give the ripoff artist who invented it credit for including things like "time crystals." We'd still want one, just to screw with people.
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Also included in this episode are: one scene where Zarkov pretends to get stoned; one scene where the "female scientist" working for Ming is hypnotized by toothpicks stuck in her forehead; one extremely "why am I here" looking Caribbean witch who tries to have an accent and pretends she's in Pirates of the Caribbean; and one scene where Dale cries and acts like a total pussy as usual.

Mostly the plot revolved around Aura's good-guy Deviate brother stealing Ming's stolen water, handing it out to the poor, and then getting blamed when the water (poisoned by Ming) starts killing people. So Flash has to rescue Good Deviate from some Bad Leatherboys who are mad about the water thing, and that's when Flash and Aura tangle with the tangle tree. Eventually the witch, who is apparently acquainted with the tangle tree, gives them the antidote to the poison water. The hypnotized Female Scientist goes on the radio and denounces Ming as the bad guy, he gets mad, then everything is back to normal. Tune in next week for more of Aura's fucking awesome outfits.

The New Frontier DVD follows Hal Jordan from the Korean War to the Kennedy era, and he becomes Green Lantern along the way. Jordan and the Martian Manhunter are the stars of the new DVD film, according to the screenwriter. Putting "Silver Age" characters back into the 1950s and 1960s makes them seem less dated, and also lets Cooke comment on issues like racism and McCarthyism. The movie hits multiple DVD formats on February 26th, 2008.

But The New Frontier isn't the only classic graphic novel to use this technique. James (Starman) Robinson won plaudits for The Golden Age, a graphic novel which followed a group of classic 1940s heroes as they coped with (once again) McCarthyism in the early 1950s. His comic starred Starman, Robotman, the original Atom and Johnny Thunder.

And then there's John Byrne's underrated Superman & Batman: Generations, which showed both heroes starting their careers in 1939, the year they originally appeared. Byrne placed the heroes in a classic setting (at the 1939 World's Fair), then showed them aging in real time. Both Superman and Batman deal with aging and handing over their responsibilities to their kids and sidekicks. (Later installments follow them into the present day and beyond.)

DC has also published several "Elseworlds" stories taking place in alternate universes, featuring Batman in the 1930s and 1940s. These include Detective 27, Citizen Wayne (a Citizen Kane riff), and Gotham Noir.