In an interesting interview with the LA Times, screenwriter/producer Goldsman seems reluctant to trash his 1997 film, which almost ruined his career along with Lost In Space. But he does admit:

"What got lost in 'Batman & Robin' is the emotions aren't real," Goldsman said, picking his words carefully. "The worst thing to do with a serious comic book is to make it a cartoon. I'm still answering for that movie with some people."

But perhaps Kevin Feige, the president of production at Marvel Studios, explained B&R's significance better, "That may be the most important comic-book movie ever made...It was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things. It created the opportunity to do 'X-Men' and 'Spider-Man,' adaptations that respected the source material and adaptations that were not campy."

And he's got a point: it did teach us all that there is a wrong way and a right way to make campy comic book movies. And if it made future comic book screenplay adapters more careful with how they portray this world, then that's one thing it has going for it as well.

Interestingly the horrible failure of a film didn't stop Goldsman from moving forward with his career and putting out the very successful A Beautiful Mind adaptation. And now that he's established his bona fides as a more serious writer, moving on to I Am Legend and writing/directing for Fringe, he's coming back to DC Comics, working on a number of upcoming projects.

Jonah Hex is wrapped, and Goldsman described Josh Brolin's character:

He's a character that has been described as having one foot on Earth and one foot beyond the grave, that he speaks to the dead . . . at the same time he is very much [like Sergio Leone's] 'The Man With No Name.'

Along with Jonah Hex Goldsman is still hard at work on The Losers and Lobo, the movie about the super powered blue-skinned alien biker. But most importantly, he's hard at work on a new Swamp Thing:

Goldsman said will be closer in tone to the character as presented in Alan Moore's eerie, metaphysical horror comics than the rubber-suit bog creature from the 1982 Wes Craven B-movie. "We want a film with real Southern, dark horror overtones, a little bit like a classic Universal horror film," Goldsman said, knowing full well that his presence on the project will stir controversy — it's a character that filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has called one of the "few remaining Holy Grails" in comics.

But it's not just DC heroes in Goldsman's future — his big-screen directorial debut may be a version of A Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin's fantasy novel set in an alternate New York, with a thief and a flying horse.

During a press conference promoting Whiteout (Itself an adaptation of the comic by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber), Silver announced:

I'm developing a picture now that I'd like to do…I'll hopefully do Swamp Thing, which is a movie we've had for a long time. We think that would be great to do in 3D.

This would be the third movie outing for the DC Comics character, and hopefully one that would return him to his horror roots (no pun intended) after The Return Of The Swamp Thing's awkward detour into comedy. No other details are known at this time.

Producer Joel Silver is Developing SWAMP THING in 3D! [Collider]

The Ballad Of Halo Jones. Moore was writing for 2000 A.D., Britain's long-running science fiction adventure comic best known for its Judge Dredd feature. Moore saw that most of England's "IPC girl comics were heading for that last great midnight feast in the dorm," and that 2000 A.D. had a bigger female readership than anyone realized. So he pitched a comic about an ordinary young woman — not "another Tough Bitch With A Disintegrator And An Extra Y Chromosome" — having adventures in space in the far future. The result is one of the most unique space operas of all time, featuring crazy adventures and silly humor and lots and lots of bleakness. (Jones' friends tend to drop dead on her on a regular basis, and in the final volume, she gets involved in a bloody space war.) The whole thing is available as a single hardcover volume from Titan Books.

Captain Britain. Moore started writing for Marvel Comics in the U.K., and took Captain Britain on a tour through alternate universes. This may be the first time that the Marvel Universe's "normal" version of Earth is referred to as Earth 616 in comics, and it also features an evil Prime Minister of England, who wants to round up all the superheroes and put them into concentration camps. I read these comics when they were reprinted as X-Men Archives Featuring Captain Britain a few years ago, and was amazed at how fresh and weird they still seem. They'll probably never be reprinted again, but those reissues can be tracked down, and there's also a collected edition. Also notable: Moore's work on Marvelman, aka Miracleman, which is even harder to find these days (and which I've never actually read!)

The Saga Of Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing was a low-selling horror comic when Moore took it over, and he transformed it into a supernatural/weird science epic that still helps to define all of DC's "mature" horror/supernatural comics, including all the Vertigo Comics line. My favorite is still the first volume, in which Swamp Thing discovers that he's not Alec Holland turned into a plant, after all — he's a plant that thinks its Alec Holland, thanks to a weird chemical accident. And he becomes the guardian of The Green, the spirit of all plant life on Earth, which is nearly usurped by the insane Jason Woodrue. All of a sudden the Swamp Thing has, not just pathos, but also a soul and real relationships, especially with the prematurely white-haired Abby.

V For Vendetta. This one, you've probably already read — but if you haven't, you should rush out and track down a copy. It's a dystopian future, and England has collapsed, giving rise to a new fascist regime run by a psychopath who's in love with his computer — literally. So it's up to the Guy Fawkes-masked anarchist vigilante known only as V to help topple the hateful oppressive regime, but his methods — especially his way of recruiting a successor — leave a lot to be desired. Just as much as Watchmen, V4V is a fantastic exploration of whether the ends justify the means, and the individual's relationship with a messed-up society.

Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? Of all Moore's work on DC's main characters, this is my favorite. (Yes, more than "The Killing Joke" or "For The Man Who Has Everything.") DC was winding up its Superman stories, in preparation for John Byrne's classic reboot. So Moore had the opportunity to write the final Superman story, in which he shows how Superman's foes become darker and more horrifying, until finally Superman has to resort to the ultimate sanction. Superman disappears soon afterwards, and is presumed dead, but 10 years later, a reporter investigates. You'll have a hard time viewing other Superman stories the same way after reading this one. Luckily, it's collected in a single volume along with all of Moore's other DC Universe work — including the amazing Green Lantern short story about the aliens that don't have any concept of light or colors.

1963. Moore (with regular collaborators like Steve Bissette, Dave Gibbons and Rick Veitch) put out a six-issue miniseries of pastiches of early 1960s Marvel comics, with titles like Tales From Beyond, Tomorrow Syndicate and Mystery Incorporated. They feature made-up superheroes like Horus, and even though they claim to be stand-alone issues of different comics, they have a continuing storyline of sorts. Plus hilarious fake ads and crazy letters to the editor. It's Moore at his most goofy and fun, and paying homage to superheroes instead of trying to recreate them or drag them into the "real world." (And it's more fun, for my money, than Moore's later Tom Strong's Terrific Tales and Tomorrow Stories anthologies.) There's no collected edition, as far as I know, but I used to see the individual issues in the dime bins at many comic book stores. Amazon now has them all for between $1.00 and $15.00 per issue.

From Hell. Moore and artist Eddie Campbell piece together all the clues about Jack The Ripper, in a huge, sprawling story of Victorian politics and Satanic rituals. The mystery isn't who killed those women — it's why, and as the graphic novel goes on, it peels back layer after layer of Victorian society to reveal more and more twisted reasons for the violence.

The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If you've only seen the horrendous movie, you owe it to yourself to track down the comic. A set of famous literary figures, including Edward Hyde, Mina Harker, Allan Quartermain, the Invisible Man and Captain Nemo, team up to save the British Empire from a series of otherworldly threats. My absolute favorite is volume two, where our heroes face off against the Martian Tripods from War Of The Worlds... and this time it'll take a bit more than the common cold to put those alien scumbags out of action. As with 1963 and several other Moore works, the fake ads accompanying the comics are worth the price of admission all by themselves, and Moore also includes some amazing text pieces. It's a journey into retrofuturist Victoriana. And thank goodness there's a third full volume coming soon, after the slightly disappointing hardcover oneshot The Black Dossier.

Promethea. Okay, this is blasphemy, I know — but the first 12 issues of Promethea might actually be my favorite Moore work of all time. I'm not saying it's better than Watchmen, just that it holds a special place in my heart. With Promethea, we come full circle to Halo Jones — it's another tale of an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances, except this time around our heroine, Sophie Bangs, is inquisitive and curious. She pieces together the history of Promethea and figures out her own way of turning into the heroine, which requires an individual act of creativity. Promethea's not just your average superhero — she's an avatar of creativity and storytelling, and she may be destined to destroy the world instead of saving it. (In the end, it's actually a lot more complicated, confusing and — yes — rewarding than that binary implies.) The more Sophie discovers about magic and fables, the more powerful she gets and the closer Moore and artist J.H. Williams come to finally taking the comics medium apart altogether. (The first two volumes are my favorites, but the rest of the series is, at the very least, fascinating and memorable.) Oh, and did I mention it's an alternate 1999 with superheroes and weird cyberculture? And an android supervillain called the Painted Doll?

Top 10. Another comic which Moore created for his America's Best Comics imprint was Top 10, the story of a super-powered police squad in a world where pretty much everybody has weird powers. In contrast to Extraordinary Gentleman's literary exploration and Promethea's magical journey, Top 10 is mostly just hilarious wicked weird fun. At times, it really does read like a version of Hill Street Blues set in a world of flying people and superstrong blue men. My favorite character: the exoskeleton-wearing canine police sergeant, Caesar. Moore gave supercop Jeff Smax his own spin-off graphic novel, and later did an amazing prequel called Top 10: The 49ers. It's all pretty addictive stuff. Science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo later did a Top 10 miniseries, which captured the inventiveness of Moore's world pretty well but wasn't quite as magnetic.

Note: I know I'm leaving out his other big ABC series Tom Strong, which I like a lot, but not quite as much as these other series. Feel free to protest and throw sharp objects in comments.

I love this fight between Swamp Thing and a generic bad guy, who claims he was trying to kill "just a dwarf" in the swamp before he gets turned into a scary tree. There actually is a whole abused dwarf subplot in this episode, which you can imagine does not bode well. I have spared you a snippet of the mega-bad guy's lair, complete with 1980s-looking girl doing a pole dance without a pole, and the horrifyingly long sequence where Swamp Thing's love interest gazes mournfully at a piece of cheap jewelry the camouflaged Swamp Thing dangles in front of her when she wanders through the swamp. Savor the memory of this one scene, safe in the knowledge that you don't have to watch the rest of this series. Unless you really want to. The first two seasons are available as a box set! [Swamp Thing via IMDB]

Every now and again, there's a battle between [DC Universe] and Vertigo about who gets to publish the character. DCU guys go up to the Vertigo offices with the issue of Batman where Swamp Thing appears and say "Clearly this is a Batman character!" and suddenly there are pitchforks and they're forced back to the elevators.

Opening the panel, DC Executive Editor Dan DiDio told fans "We have nothing to talk about, so we're turning it over to you." Inviting questions from the audience, a line-up consisting of editors DiDio, Mike Carlin, Jann Jones, VP of Sales Bob Wayne and creators Sergio Aragones and James Robinson (announced as "writer of Superman and a book to be named later," with a later tease when DiDio asked him "Do you like writing Green Arrow?") were in full-on tease form when avoiding giving straight answers to straight questions. Some highlights:

* Following Steve Gerber's death, four writers will be writing the final issue of Gerber's Countdown To Mystery series, with each writer providing a four-page sketch of how they think that Gerber would have ended the story. The writers involved will be Mark Waid, Wonder Woman's Gail Simone, Countdown's Adam Beechen and Gerber's close friend, Mark Evanier (DNAgents).

* Fan-favorite book Manhunter will return, but not until there are enough finished scripts to make sure the book will ship on a monthly schedule.

* Birds of Prey, the book that stars former Batgirl Barbara Gordon, will be moving to a new fictional city in the future, just in time for Gordon to meet the villain that crippled her, the Joker, in a move in no way related to that whole Dark Knight movie coming out this summer. Not at all.

* Superstar artist George Perez may be going into the future for his next project. The artist, best known for his work on 1980s universe-ending saga Crisis On Infinite Earths provided the cover for May's DC Universe: Zero, which DiDio said "may lead into what he's doing next". The stars of that particular cover? Futuristic teen super-heroes, the Legion of Super-Heroes.

* Swamp Thing won't be returning to any DC superhero books anytime soon... officially. When asked if the character would be appearing in the DC Universe, DiDio replied that, while the executive editor of the mature-readers Vertigo imprint wasn't giving permission for them to use the character any time soon, "we would never put him in a comedic book without their knowledge. Nooooo." (My guess for that comedic book? The revival of 1980s self-referential comedy Ambush Bug, due in July).

* James Robinson will be returning to characters from his popular Starman series, writing a spin-off series starring the Shade anti-hero. But don't expect it anytime soon - He doesn't plan to finish writing it for at least a year.

* DC's much-hyped, rarely-seen new Batwoman character will be getting her own series... but we won't officially find out about that until tomorrow.

When asked about DC characters getting their own movies, the panel played coy. "We like movies," Jann Jones commented. A fan pointed out that Marvel Comics have two movies coming out this summer (Iron Man and Incredible Hulk) to DC's one (The Dark Knight), leading Bob Wayne to respond "Well, in that case, it's quantity versus quality," to an almost-Oprah audience-worthy "Ooooooooh".

Tomorrow's panels - including a 90-minute DC-centric presentation that will undoubtedly feature their big 2008 plans - will, hopefully, manage to put out something crunchier than cheap shots at the opposition, but who can tell...?