I came back home and what do you know, still no power. But, rather than say "eff it" and go see a movie, I said to myself "Self, how can I still get this done with no Photoshop?" So, I sat down on my couch by the window with a little sketchpad and some pencils and pens and doodled out your disaster for this week. I threw in a couple of Photoshopperies, but for the most part This Is Disaster by Candlelight.


LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT vs SCIENCE FICTION:
You see... this atmosphere of animosity in the book world is why I only watch Michael Bay movies.



SOLAR PORN:
Nasa released images of sunspots? Or an intergalactic game of lights and sound? (to be fair I just kind of felt like drawing Galactus)



BOOK OF ELI:
New trailer came out this week... eh



BIRTH OF VADER PLAYSET:
Wow, I guess the fine line between obscure (every character from Gonk to the Tonnika Sisters getting a figure) and unnecessary was discovered this week. This Christmas morning go outside and listen for a chorus of....



IN PRAISE OF MACGUFFINS:
I look forward to part II where Annalee examines the red herring but for now I'll let the discussion continue here.



NIC CAGE as SUPERMAN!!!:
I got nothing.



THIS IS A DISASTER!:
Eh. Is any movie starring Bruce Willis really a disaster?

Until next week, this is Garrison Dean saying, you're the best.

Well, I guess I could tell you more... For one thing, this is the week where we find out who the new Batman is (Clue: It's exactly who you think it is) in Batman: Battle For The Cowl #3 (Another hero identity revelation can be found in Marvel's Who Is The Black Panther? collection).

It's also the week where Garth Ennis' The Boys spins out a new series, Herogasm, parodying superhero excess, just as Marvel's Captain America reaches its 50th issue with the start of a storyline apparently as shocking as Cap's assassination.

Shying away from similar controversies, DC looks to the stars for Rann/Thanagar: Holy War, the first (of two) collections of their cosmic jihad storyline, just as Marvel's Planet Skaar Prologue and Ultimate Galactus Trilogy demonstrate more traditional approaches to intergalactic invasions. Also traditional and from Marvel, X-Men Forever: Alpha reprints Chris Claremont and Jim Lee's swansong together ahead of the upcoming series set in that continuity, providing the most old-fashioned book available this week... Well, apart (perhaps) from Batman: Mad Love And Other Stories, a hardcover collecting all of Paul Dini and Bruce Timm's joint comic work.

You don't want to know about all of that, though; you want to know about IDW's Transformers extravaganza that sees two movie prequel collections (Alliance and Defiance) as well as the collection of Revenge Of The Fallen: Movie Adaptation and the first issue of the serialization, as well.

How could you ask for more... and even if you did, what would you ask for?

Perhaps Dracula, who gets two books to himself this week, both adapting Bram Stoker's original novel - Ben Templesmith's Dracula presents the original text with new illustrations from the Australian wunderkind, while The Complete Dracula sees the book (complete with "missing" chapters) adapted into traditional comic form over five issues. Why not take a bite out of both, to compare?

Whether it's giant robots or bloodsucking vampires, your local comic store should be able to crave your particular desires. And once you've run down the complete shipping list for the week, you'll have a better idea of what kind of fangs... I mean things are yours for the taking.

He Was Abducted by Aliens

Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams: Arthur Dent, one of the token Earthlings traveling through the stars, discovers a Tennessean singer with the initials “EP” at an alien bar called “The Domain of the King.” Dent and Ford Prefect buy a pink spaceship from the fellow and tip him an obscene amount for singing “Love Me Tender.”

Animaniacs “Space Probed”: One fateful night, the Warner siblings find themselves aboard an alien spacecraft. A quick inspection of the ship proves that they’re not the ship’s first Earthling guests. Elvis has beaten them to the punch, along with Amelia Earhart, Bigfoot, and Jimmy Hoffa.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, insists he never laid a hand on Mr. Presley, no matter what some pub quiz game says. Chances are that Elvis either is flipping patties at a Burger Lord in Des Moines, or was abducted by aliens who thought him too good for our world.

He Is an Alien

Men in Black: If MIB taught us anything, it’s that anyone you’ve ever suspected of being from another world actually is, from Dennis Rodman to your kooky third grade English teacher. As for the King, he didn’t die, Agent K coolly informs us; he just went home.

“The Bride of Elvis” Kathleen Ann Goonan: Elvis wasn’t just the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll; he was a King, a royal member of an alien race. Fearing his party-hearty ways on Earth would lead to his premature demise, his caretakers, known as “Brides,” place him in a death-like coma until their ship returns to take him away.

He Faked His Death

Bubba Ho-tep: Weary of his fame, Elvis decides to take a breather and find someone else to endure his endless public adoration. He exchanges lives with the world’s most convincing Elvis impersonator, but when the facsimile dies on the can, no one believes that Elvis is the genuine King. He lives out his remaining days in relative peace, at least until the mummies and vampires start showing up.

Death Becomes Her: All individual who partake of Lisle von Rhoman’s immortality elixir must eventually disappear from the public eye. But Elvis can’t resist the occasional tabloid photo op.

Preacher by Garth Ennis: Jesse Custer picks up a number of hitchhikers as he heads towards the Alamo, but perhaps the most memorable is the shadowy Southerner who rhapsodizes on his long-surrendered fame. He never says his name, but reveals his identity as soon as he slides into Custer’s car with a “Thangyu Verrmuch.”

The Chronicle “The King is Undead”: In an episode written by The Middleman’s Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the journalists of tabloid newspaper The Chronicle discover that all Elvis impersonators are, in fact, vampires. And it seems that when the King learned this horrifying truth, he faked his death, adopted the name of his stillborn twin, and became the world’s foremost hunter of the Elvis-themed undead.

The X-Files: In “Shadow,” conspiracy-obsessed Fox Mulder jokes that Elvis Presley was the only man to successfully fake his own death (Andy Kaufman apparently bit it for real). But when the Lone Gunmen investigate an Elvis impersonator only to discover that he isn’t actually Elvis, the trio begins to worry that the King may truly be dead.

He’s Alive and Well, in an Alternate Universe

Armageddon: The Musical by Robert Rankin: A group of aliens become frightfully distressed when their favorite soap opera – the planet Earth – is about to be canceled due to Armageddon. To extend Earth’s airtime, they decide to create an alternate plotline in which Earth’s destruction is delayed. So they send Barry the Time Sprout back in time to persuade Elvis Presley to resist the draft, thus averting US involvement in Vietnam. The time-traveling Elvis ends up creating some alternate histories of his own, including one in which he’s worshipped as God.

He’s Been Copied

Thriller by Robert Loren Fleming: The short DC series features Kane Creole, an Elvis clone turned bank robber. Creole’s none too pleased with the way his creators desecrated the original Elvis’ remains and angrily kills them off.

What If? “What If Thanos Changed Galactus Into a Human Being?”: In this hypothetical tale, Thanos responds to Galactus’ attack on him by transforming the planet eater into a human being. But the remade Galactus isn’t just any human; he’s a perfect copy of Elvis Presley – before the weight gain and the undignified toilet death. Galactus can even sing and dance like the King, and when Galactus is offered the chance to return to space godhood, opts instead to remain on Earth and keep Elvis’ legacy alive.

He’s Really Dead. Honest.

Elvissey by Jack Womack: Elvis may be dead, but that doesn’t stop a cult from emerging in the year 2033 claiming him as semi-divine. In an attempt to maintain their monopoly on the human consciousness, a multinational corporation sends two of its agents to retrieve a young Elvis Presley from an alternate history’s past. But the Elvis they bring back is less “King of Rock” than “sexual predator.”

Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries by Charlaine Harris: Elvis hasn’t made it into True Blood yet, but in the source material, the King was discovered very slightly alive by a vampiric morgue attendant. The misguided vamp decides to make the overdosed Elvis undead, but the resulting creature, answering only to “Bubba,” is somehow brain damaged by the process. The other vampires treat him as a dimwitted errand boy, and try to keep him clear of any household pets.

“You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” by Stephen King: Presley is the mayor of the ironically named town of Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven, a spot in the afterlife where all the great, tragically deceased rock stars of the world gather and subject “normal” residents to interminable concerts for all eternity.

Odd Thomas Series by Dean Koontz: Elvis numbers among the ghosts who befriend the specter-spotting Odd Thomas. Elvis is reluctant to leave the world of the living because he’s not prepared to face his mother’s spirit.

Six-String Samurai: After a Russian nuclear attack destroys an alternate America, Elvis becomes the literal king of a chunk of the American Southwest. After four decades of rule, he dies, and America’s remaining musicians vie to fill his rhinestone-covered shoes.

RoboCop 2: Lest we had any doubt about the King’s demise, RoboCop 2 settles it. The megalomaniacal drug dealer Cain has Elvis’ skeleton, which is sealed inside a glass coffin.

The Twilight Zone “The Once and Future King”: Not only is Elvis unequivocally dead in this Twilight Zone episode, he actually died long before 1977. Gary, an Elvis impersonator, gets sent back to 1954 and meets his idol. But when he tries to prematurely introduce Elvis to rock music and his famous shaking hips, a baffled Elvis becomes enraged and Gary is forced to kill him in self-defense. Gary then takes on Elvis’ identity and spends the next two decades living out every Elvis impersonator’s dream.

Marvel Comics’ big summer Spider-Man storyline, “New Ways To Die”, promises to introduce a new villain into the webslinger’s life: a mysterious character connected to his enemy Venom, called Anti-Venom. The most recent issue of Marvel’s Fantastic Four series featured Mr. Fantastic stopping an invincible foe by wearing his new “Anti-Galactus suit”. Sensing a trend here? We've got the full back story on this new anti-zeitgeist.

This isn’t the first time that comic characters have had to face their opposites, although it’s mostly been a DC schtick; Superman’s imperfect clone Bizarro does everything Superman does backwards, after all, and the Flash has had a Reverse-Flash to deal with for decades, now (There’s even a Legion of Super-Villains for the Legion of Super-Heroes). It's not even the first time that a villain has used the "Anti-" prefix (Who can forget Crisis on Infinite Earths' Anti-Monitor, who outlasted the Monitor by about two thirds of the series?). But Marvel’s latest version of this idea may have less to do with exploring the undersides of villains’ identities and more to do with exploiting brands for cheap identification - Fantastic Four’s Anti-Galactus was a one-time appearance with no connection to the series’ giant planet-eater beyond the name, after all. As to who and what Anti-Venom turns out to be, that’s still shrouded in mystery for the most part, with Amazing Spider-Man editor Steve Wacker playing dumb when asked to elaborate:

[He’s a b]rand new [character]...but he does have a tie to an existing villain in Spidey's life.

Gee, do you think that villain could be Venom? (The current and former Venoms have already been announced to be appearing in "New Ways To Die"; current speculation is that the original Venom, Eddie Brock, will turn into the Anti-Venom.)

For a more in-depth dichotomy between hero and villain, maybe you should be looking to The Sentry, Marvel’s Superman clone who happens to be his own worst enemy… literally. The Sentry’s arch-nemesis, The Void, happens to be the evil side of the Sentry’s schizophrenic secret identity, Robert Reynolds, split into his own, separate, body. I could explain exactly how that works, but all you really need to know is, “Hey. It’s comics.” That whole “man versus his own dark side” thing is much easier here; even Captain America is doing it (Give it two months, and one of them will be calling himself the Anti-Cap).

Introducing the Anti-Venom [IGN]

#3: The Doomsday Machine: Okay, so this danger from a 1967 episode of Star Trek isn't exactly a person as much as a giant machine that consumes planets to fuel its own destructive rampage, but dude! Consuming planets! One of Trek's better fear-of-technology menaces, this particular planet eater gains extra points for destroying an entire starship and, according to a novel written more than twenty years later by Peter David, having been created to destroy Next Generation villains the Borg by a whole race of Whoopi Goldbergs.

#2: Unicron: Only one man could properly portray the voice of a planet that transforms into a robot that eats planets - self-loathing much? - and that man had to be Orson Welles, ending his career with a suitable bookend to his Citizen Kane start with his last ever role in 1986's Transformers: The Movie. If you were twelve years old when the movie came out then Unicron was possibly the greatest evil Transformer ever, mostly because of the fact that he made shitty old Megatron into the Leonard Nimoy-voiced Galvatron. More proof that he was awesome came in the fact that it took toymakers seventeen years to come up with a toy that measured up to fans' expectations. But even Unicron is just a pale imitation of...

#1: Galactus: Easily the biggest and best of sci-fi's planet eaters, Galactus' victory comes from the fact that - unlike Unicron or the Doomsday Machine - he isn't a robot but an honest-to-goodness force of nature. The sole survivor of a pre-Big Bang universe, the Fantastic Four's largest enemy may have been killed more than once in various stories since his 1966 first appearance (including being eaten by superhuman zombies in parallel world comedy Marvel Zombies), but nothing can keep a large purple-bucket-headed cosmic entity down for that long, even one given to pretentious monologues about how hungry he is.

Others may come and try to steal Galactus' crown but, really, who even remembers DC Comics' Imperiex, even if he does call himself "the devourer of galaxies"? Exactly. Created by comic greats Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Galactus is proof that sometimes, the biggest threat really is the best. But what about the rest of you? Is there another villain of planetary appetite that should be added to the list?

The Doomsday Machine [Star Trek.com]
Unicron [Teletraan 1]
Galactus [Marvel Directory.com]

What could be scarier than a bunch of new agey doctors giving you weird drugs while you're pregnant with Satan, or maybe an alien? Watch Mia Farrow try to cope with city life while pregnant with . . . something. It's all just typical New York stuff in Rosemary's Baby (1968), the ultimate urban mom horror-scifi monsterfest.

Speaking of scary babies, the man who brought you the ultimate evil baby movie It's Alive, Larry Cohen, made one of the great early-80s NY monster movies: Q the Winged Serpent (1982). Not only does it feature amazing stop-motion work on the monster — some sort of resurrected Aztec god — but you simply cannot beat a movie where a semi-naked lady sunbathing on her NY rooftop is snatched up and eaten by a winged lizard.
V, the Miniseries (1983) featured seemingly-nice aliens who came from a ship hovering over New York, but who would later rip off their human skins to reveal their hideous, reptile faces and evil natures. Though they claimed that they wanted to be friends with humans, it turned out they just wanted to eat us, turn us into soldiers, and use us as slaves. Much of the miniseries takes place in New York, though the human resistance to the aliens is located (improbably) in Los Angeles.

In response to rumors that alligators and other nasties were turning mutant in New York's sewers, a band of filmmaking geniuses brought you C.H.U.D., (1984) a tale about "cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers" who come out at night to eat New Yorkers. Now let's not get too picky about details, since if these creatures aren't human it's not exactly cannibalistic for them to eat people. One of the best B-movies of the 80s, if only due to the frantic efforts in movie ads to tie the flick into "current events."

And then, of course, there's the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man who almost destroyed New York in Ghostbusters (1984). Best giant monster ever.

In 1985, Greg Bear gave us the first nanotechnology "gray goo" scenario in his memorable novel Blood Music. In it, an experiment with nanotech goes horribly wrong after a Jekyll-ish scientist injects the nanites into his bloodstream and they become self-aware. After disassembling the scientist's body, they go on a global rampage, turning humans into the raw materials for their new cities. There's an amazing scene where a character looks out over New York City after its conversion to nanotech and says most of the city "looked like it was covered in brown and black blankets."

One of the best monsters ever to hit New York starred (not surprisingly) in a mostly-forgotten movie by Guillermo Del Toro (director of Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth) called Mimic (1997). In it, giant cockroaches (you can see one in the top image) from the NY sewers learn to emulate human form in order to camouflage themselves, hide in the subways, and EAT PEOPLE. Seriously great human-size monsters here. Mira Sorvino stars as the detective on their trail.

We try not to speak of Roland Emmerich's U.S. version of Godzilla (1998), but there it is. The movie was made; it had a really lame CGI version of Godzilla in it; New York was attacked. There, I admitted the movie exists. Now I will close my eyes and start chanting again.

And of course no list of NY monsters would be complete without at least a cursory nod to the Fantastic Four, since pretty much every Marvel hero lives in New York anyway. That's why Galactus attacked New York in the most recent Fantastic Four movie. Galactus is just a scary cloud in the movie, but looks more like a regular giant monster or maybe a giant robot in the comic books.

And the outlier: A giant chicken terrorizes Hoboken in Daniel Pinkwater's young-adult novel The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (1977). Later made into a movie, the novel is great stuff — goofy and smart — plus it's the only story we can think of about giant chickens set in New Jersey.

I'll say that again, in case you missed it: Scientists have found a galaxy that might have swallowed another galaxy. The further analysis of images of NGC 4622, you see, revealed that the galaxy actually has another set of arms inside the center, arms that trail in the opposite direction to the known arms. According to New Scientist, that got them thinking:

Scientists still do not understand how the galaxy got its oppositely oriented arms. One possibility is that the inner arms are the result of a struggle with a smaller galaxy that veered perilously close to NGC 4622 and was swallowed. Before being ripped to shreds, the smaller galaxy could have stirred up matter in NGC 4622's inner regions, leading it to settle in a spiral pattern opposite to that in the outer regions.

Image courtesy NASA

Galaxy's spiral arms point in opposite directions [New Scientist]

Famous names: Keith Giffen, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Simon Furman, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Scott Kolins, Renato Arlem, Kev Walker, Jorge Lucas, Gregory Titus, Andrea DiVito.

Crunchy goodness: 4

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Two one-shots focus on the Heralds of Galactus after the brutal smackdown they received in the series. In 2007, Marvel launched an ongoing Nova comic and published a followup set of miniseries called Annihilation Conquest. Also, Marvel is publishing What If: Annihilation, which shows what would have happened if the Annihilation Wave had reached Earth.

Sights you'll never unsee: The evil Thanos captures Moondragon, the lesbian daughter of Drax the Destroyer, and rips off her ear to send to Drax.

Elevator pitch: It's like if the Borg teamed up with Darth Vader and Ming the Merciless, and beat the crap out of the Klingons and the Romulans.

"Annihilation" MegaReview