So what is American Vampire?

The series follows, and is focused on, the concept of vampire geneology and vampire evolution. It reimagines vampires as these creatures that have evolved as the bloodlines hit different populations at different times, so there's different species of vampires, like there are different breeds of dogs. So there's this whole hidden history, this whole secret family tree. But the thing that it's about specifically is, there hasn't been a new breed of vampire in a couple of hundred years for reasons that are part of the fun mystery of the first couple of [story cycles]. There's only this one dominant species, and it's the one that's the classic, Euro-centric, nocturnal, stake through the heart... You know, the vampire that, when I conceived of the series, we were all a little sick of. The star of the series is the bloodline, this new breed of vampirism. The forward-moving part of the series, the part that's most exciting for us is, we have new characters with each cycle, with big parts played by favorite characters from the past, but we'll also be revealing parts of the secret history and how the world of vampires came to be the way it is. And also, the brewing tension between all the breeds of vampires that exist now.

So there's a big, behind the curtain, story that we're working on as well [as the individual story arcs].

So how did it get started? Did you pitch it to Vertigo?

I came up with it as a concept a few years ago, actually - I don't know how interesting this is, it's kind of a boring story, but I was in one of those model shops, like Warhammer shops, down in the West Village and I saw one of those figurines, and it was a zombie confederate soldier. I just started thinking about how, in so much vampire material at the time - and this was before Twilight, more around the Queen of the Damned time - vampires were always nocturnal and aristocratic and elegant and it just seemed so out of place, and out of touch with any straight-up American iconography that I could come up with, or my favorite genres, like westerns or 50s sci-fi and all that kind of stuff. I was like, how come we never see vampires in these kind of places?

I started to develop the idea back then, and I thought about doing it as a series of stories, I thought about doing it as a book, and at one point I was going to do it as a screenplay with a friend. But basically, I started doing some comic work on the side about a year ago, and I got the chance to pitch it to Vertigo last summer when an editor at Vertigo called Mark Doyle, who's since become one of my closest friends, read one of my stories in an anthology of literary writers coming up with new superheroes. He actually approached me at a reading for the book and asked if I was a serious comic fan, or just moonlighting for the purposes of the story. I told him I was, I'd always been, and I feel like he gave me a pop quiz; he was all, Well, what're you reading right now? And at the time, it was Final Crisis and Secret Invasion and everything like that. I think he was convinced, and he asked me if I wanted to pitch something. So I went there and I think he sort of expected me to pitch something more literary, but I was like, Hey, what about this vampire thing?
I'd been thinking about doing it as a comic for awhile, and thinking about approaching people who do more horror comics, like IDW or whatever, and then this came along and he really flipped over it. Once we got it on the table, it went pretty fast through development there. It was pretty much greenlit when they asked if there was anyone that I knew who from the writing world who might be interested in giving it a quote or a blurb. I knew Stephen King from before, so I asked him if he would be willing to do it. He read the pitch and decided that he really liked it and said, I'll do you one better. If you want, at some point, I'll write an issue for you. It's pretty funny; I called Vertigo on, I think it was a Friday afternoon, and left a message saying that Steve was interested - By the way, he makes you call him Steve, I don't want to sound like an asshole going "Steve, Steve" - I left a message on Friday afternoon pretty much when the office was already closed saying that he was serious about wanting to do an issue, and it was Monday morning, 9 in the morning, I get a call and everyone was there, and they're all "Did you say Stephen King was interested in doing an issue...?" [laughs]

Once he was involved we wanted to [work out how best for him to write an issue or two]. The characters were all developed, I had the seasons mapped out from the pitch. Steve wanted to write this character, who was planned for the second cycle, but Mark and I came up with the idea of doing it like an eight-page, or a teaser, at the end of each issue, to show a glimpse of Skinner, who's the first American vampire. He started writing it, and then he wrote me an email two weeks into it and asked if I'd mind if he went off the reservation a little bit. I was, like, go ahead, do whatever you want. He wound up writing five episodes of sixteen pages, doing so much better than I could've ever done. It really does raise the bar for the series, and he introduced so many big ideas about what the American West means to us, and all these questions about fact and fiction and legend versus history, and all this stuff that really enriches it. Not to mention, he just makes it really scary and vicious.

How did Rafael [Albuquerque, series artist] come aboard? His preview art is beautiful.

Oh my God. I promise you, this guy is incredible. He came in and did some sketches to see if he got the characters, based on the scripts, because the scripts were done, and he just nailed it immediately. It was, that's our guy. The funny thing is, some of the promo art, the sketches of Pearl...? That's from his audition, those're some of his first sketches. That was the first thing I saw from him, and I thought, that's my character. That's exactly her. She's a little bookish, independent, a little quirky. He's been such a creative force on the series, he brings so much to it.
Rafael, when he read the scripts, was like, Why don't I do the different cycles in different styles? So he would up doing Steve's cycle - which is the origin story of Skinner, who's the first of the new American vampire species, born of this random mutation - in these beautiful washes, so it has this painted, antique quality to it, as well as a creepiness. And for mine - which takes place in the 1920s and picks up on the second American vampire, the first person Skinner turns, who's this young girl and a struggling actress in the silent film industry - he did it in this precise inked, art deco style. I can't reiterate enough how amazing he has been on the book. He's enhanced it, he's been a total superhero himself on it.

It sounds like this a really big story.

I'm so excited for the places we're going to go. We're already mapped out through the first twelve issues. The next cycle is already page broken, after these first five issues, and after that, the next cycle is pretty much thought out. And after that, I know what decade it's taking place in. It's fun with all of the press it's getting, the fun of introducing [the concept]. There's something sexy about an American vampire, because "It's American!" [laughs]. It's an interesting time to be American. Part of the series is about investigating what's horrific about the American character, and what's heroic about it, and the difference of that in different periods. But we're really way ahead of the game in terms of giving ourselves time to do eight or nine drafts of the scripts, because, believe me, no-one is more aware of a potential vampire backlash or the pressure once Steve is not on the series. We believe in it a lot.

American Vampire seems to be more than just a title, it's a statement of the book's intent, the American versus European...

Well, it's a fun hook, and there's a kind of, I guess, patriotic thrill in introducing a vampire that's supposed to be American and is stronger and more vicious and so on, but the story isn't about cultural stereotypes. The idea is that the bloodline mutates randomly at various times, and some of the characteristics of the person are adapted into that vampire. So it's the characteristics of a person, of Skinner, rather than a nationality, because otherwise you get into the specifics of, what makes us African-American, what makes us... It's person-to-person. Every once in awhile the bloodline will jump, not with every new person it hits, but every once in awhile, the blood will make something new with someone.

We're trying to keep it geneological, but the vampiric qualities have an American characteristic, because it comes from the character of Skinner and he is a character that's iconographic to the [Old] West, where he's this vicious snakelike outlaw. He has this desert quality, but they're based on him, based on a broad cultural assessment on what makes us American.

But what we are starting to do is explore the idea of American identity through the different time periods. With the first issues, it's a little tough, just because of the format, sixteen pages of story for Steve and sixteen for me, so there's a tightness to it that works really well for the way they double as stories. But there's more breathing room, I think, for exploring the decades once we get past the first cycle.

Pearl seems as iconic in her own way as Skinner.

I can promise you that the way they come across on the page, they're not someone you've seen before. Skinner is not The Man With No Name, in the same way that Pearl is very much her own character while keeping that quality of the "20s Girl." She's someone who's more fish out of water, she's a lot more bookish and isn't caught up in the glamour. She loves acting for her own reasons, and a lot of it comes from her upbringing. We try to flesh the characters out so that they're more than just their iconographic selves, especially these two. Pearl and Skinner are two opposing forces early on the series. Skinner is anarchy and violence and fun, and has the opinion that what makes us American is what keeps the west wild, and that we should be wild, and the taming of the west he sees as a feminization, an imposition on the American character. You can imagine how that works itself out in different time periods, where there's prohibition, or the construction of Las Vegas.

Pearl, on the other hand, is ethical and struggling to be someone who carries the best qualities of what we would think as American. She has a more hopeful and optimistic belief.

Is this going to be a series where there's a lot of jumping around in time periods, as opposed to telling the story chronologically?

Yeah, each one is going to approach a different decade, at least at first. Each story will pick up in a different decade but the same bloodline in surprising ways, so there will be some chronological jumping.

Are you watching True Blood, reading or watching the Twilights?

I'm a huge fan of True Blood. Some things I've not caught up with... I read the first Twilight - my wife has actually read all of them - but my feeling is, each one of them brings something different to vampire lore. I've never seen vampires as teen heartthrobs the way that Twilight does it, or the reimagining of vampires as a sociological underclass and the Southern Gothic elements of True Blood make that really fresh. For us, we're trying to bring something new to the table too. American Vampire wasn't conceived as the tale end of a trend. It definitely, for me, predated both of those, so I'm hoping that - When each one of those came out, we were all, Oh, it's just part of the trend, but the better stuff comes out in the crashing of a wave and you're like, That's awesome! We're hoping that we have that kind of response.

We really have put a lot of sweat and blood into it about making it something different and high quality, so that if there were no other vampire things around, you're look at it in the same way. I was thinking about it, but other than Bram Stoker's Dracula, I haven't seen a vampire comic since the peak of 30 Days of Night. For us, it's great not to be on TV with Vampire Diaries or True Blood, and we're not a movie, so hopefully it'll stand apart as a good read.
American Vampire debuts in March from Vertigo.

Eco-Apocalypse

2012: It's pure global catastrophe in Roland Emmerich's film. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions — every possible natural disaster seems to conspire to wipe out all life on Earth.

Decipher by Stel Pavlou: The year 2012 sees an increase in solar flare activity as scientists see unusual energy signals coming from Antarctica. It soon becomes clear that the sun could be on the verge of triggering a deluge, and all the world's cities could go the way of Atlantis.

Death from the Skies

2012: Supernova: If you're looking for something beyond the usual asteroid strike, here's a different sort of celestial doomsday. A nearby star goes supernova, threatening the Earth's survival, prompting an international team of scientists to launch nuclear warheads to reduce the effect of the impact.

2012: Doomsday: On December 21, 2012, one day before the predicted apocalypse, it is revealed that a celestial object is about to collide with Earth. But this time, it's religion, not science that averts the ultimate disaster.

World War III

Blood of the Beast: Roughly half the population dies in the war of 2012, but the world's chemical weapons render nearly all the men on Earth sterile. The world is repopulated by clones, but 19 years after the first clones are harvested in 2012, the world goes to pot once again.

Zombie Plague

Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection: The dead start rising early in 2012, and soon the plague has spread across much of North America. And corporate greed has ensured that you can become a zombie even if you've never encountered the walking dead.

I Spit On Your Rave: The film doesn't get released until next year, but its zombie apocalypse starts at the 2012 London Olympics, when a virus is released. Humanity is quickly gobbled up, leaving the zombies to their own devices.

Alien Invasion

The X-Files: Alien colonization has always been a distinct probability in the X-Files universe, and in the episode "The Truth," the Cigarette Smoking Man reveals the date of invasion: December 22, 2012.

2012: The War of Souls by Whiley Strieber: Michael Bay is looking to adapt this tale of alien invasion. It turns out that the world's ancient monuments provide a gateway for alien invaders looking to conquer Earth and eat humanity's souls. And, if the invasion is not prevented in time, the gateways will open December 21, 2012.

RahXephon: The end of the Long Count Calendar marks another alien invasion, this one by the Mulians. The Mu declare war on humanity and enclose the city of Tokyo inside a spherical barrier.

Domain Trilogy by Steve Alten: Scientists may suggest that the dinosaurs were killed off by a meteorite, but the truth is that they fell prey to an ancient weapon buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico. And, if we don't learn the truth about those extraterrestrial exterminators by December 2012, we could be next.

Doctor Who "Dalek": Fortunately, the Doctor and Rose manage to stop Henry van Statten's captive Dalek before it can surface from his Statten's Utah bunker in 2012. Otherwise, the Dalek could have very well exterminated a good chunk of humanity.

A Glitch in the System

Wapsi Square: It's not that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012, it's just that the quantum clock that runs the world must be reset at precisely the time and date the Long Count Calendar runs out. Otherwise, time resets back to an earlier point in time, trapping us all in a time loop. But you won't notice it — after all, it's happened several times before.

Goats: After the untimely demise of God, the Mayan programming firm One Death was hired to keep the multiverse going. Unfortunately, a glitch in the system will cause the multiverse to crash on December 21, 2012, unless the prophesied Programmer can be located in time.

PW2: 2012 by MC Miller: Former professor Hamilton Ray begins to notice strange patterns and synchronicities in in the universe, and develops a theory about a Probability Wave, something that's about to bring about a radical change in the universe at the end of 2012.

The World Is Radically Transformed

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison: The world as we know it may come to an end on December 22, 2012, but it's hardly doomsday. Instead, humanity ascends to the Supercontext, the next level of existence, at the word of Jack Frost.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure by Hirohiko Araki: The priest Enrico Pucci acquires the stand Made in Heaven, which gives its user the power to rewrite the universe. And in 2012, Pucci attempted to remake the universe to suit his master Dio Brando. However, Pucci died before the universe could be completely rewritten, causing it to return to something close to its original form.

Shadowrun: Similarly, the world doesn't end in the Shadowrun universe, but as the Mayan calendar resets, the world undergoes a dramatic transformation. Magic returns to the Earth, allowing individuals, governments, and corporations to utilize a potent combination of cutting edge technologies and newly harnessed magic.

Additional reporting by Josh Snyder.

Last night we caught up with two lame subsubplots (Head Parkman and Rainbow Brite) as well as the greatest subsubplot that never was (Claire's Lesbian Quest).

So let's dispense with the whole Head Parkman/Head Sylar/Nobody Actually Gets Any Head deal. Reach back into your memories, and you'll recall that this whole narrative ordeal began when Parkman erased Sylar's identity from Sylar's body. He made Sylar Body think it was Nathan, but unfortunately the unintended consequence was that Parkman grew a Head Sylar who made him see things and tormented him with endless quips when Parkman was trying to have sex with his wife and stuff like that.

There was a whole long thing where Parkman thought he could banish Head Sylar by getting totally drunk, but then when he passed out Sylar took over completely. So now Parkman is actually Sylar with a Head Parkman. Which gets really confusing, especially when we keep seeing Sylar in the same suit that Parkman is wearing. In the scene above, you can see that Head Parkman is trying to put the bitchslap on Body Sylar, which I think might be the only moment in the entire show when Parkman has gotten even a tiny bit toppy. But then Body Sylar kills the dude who is trying to help them fix their car, and threatens to kill more if Parkman won't tell him how he got to be Head Sylar in the first place.

At some point during this whole mess, Body Sylar informs Head Parkman, "The world is my hostage." This is the kind of brilliant line that keeps all of us coming back week after week to laugh in this show's face.

Finally Head Parkman caves and tells Body Sylar everything while they're in the diner where Charlie used to work. But then Head Parkman manages to distract Body Sylar into writing "I have a gun and am going to kill everybody in here" on his napkin, then throwing it at the waitress before they leave the diner. Instantly, the cops arrive and shoot them after Parkman is all "Yeah I'm willing to die." OK let's think about this realistically, people. A guy is at your diner, and you see that he's written "I have a gun and will kill" AFTER HE LEAVES. So the guy is GONE. Do you call the cops, or just say "Wow what a weirdo." Also, if you do call the cops, do they really come out based on a napkin threat that some dude THREW AWAY?

Anyway, my point is that Body Parkman, Body Sylar, Head Parkman, AND Head Sylar have all been shot a whole bunch of times. Will they live????

I will leave it to you to puzzle out the answer to that one, because we need to think hard about Emma AKA Rainbow Brite and Peter. So our pal Emma's special wall-smashing rainbow music power has gone back to being just rainbowy. We learn snoringly that the reason why she left medical school is that her nephew drowned because she couldn't hear him while she was babysitting.

Meanwhile, Peter's glances across the room have inspired her to start doing emergency medical procedures on people and playing the piano all the time at work. Doesn't she have a job doing paperwork? Isn't the hospital sort of weirded out that their med school dropout administrator is sewing people up and opening up holes in their lungs or whatever? Apparently not - I guess the hospital is so short-staffed that they just figure it's better for admins to do medical procedures.

It's all OK, though, because Emma has now decided to go back to medical school. And you know, all she has to do is decide that and she's magically back in medical school! That's how med school works.

While Emma finesses her readmission to med school, Peter is using his healing power to save lives right and left. But healing powers drain his energy and give him headaches! So there's a PRICE TO PAY. If this show is going to keep reheating its old cliches, I'm just going to order the Tahitian pancakes. WTF are Tahitian pancakes anyway?

Which brings me to the one point of light in my otherwise dreary TV existence. Claire's lesbian subsubplot. Which ended in the lamest possible way this week. OK, I take that back. It could have been worse: Gretchen could have died, or Claire could have said, "I really love you but can't have sex so even though I want to be your lovemuncher I am going to pull a Twilight on your ass." Instead, we're supposed to believe that the formerly brave and intrepid Gretchen has decided to drop out of college and go home just because of one teeny attack from the invisible girl. Seriously? She's been total Scary Google Chick with Brave Lesbo Feelings up to now, but when the going gets weird she's weirded out? I call shenanigans.

Then we get even more character motivation shoehorned into this munged subsubplot when Samuel pays Claire a visit and reveals that HRG shot Becky the invisible girl's dad and that Becky is damaged as a result. She wants revenge on HRG, which is why she's killing Claire's friends, which sort of kind of makes sense if you do a brain squint. But of course he's playing a DEEP GAME, and in fact even though he pretends to be all concerned about Becky and eventually shoots her with a taser to stop her, he's actually manipulating Claire.

Also, he gives that same speech he's been giving every episode about how family accepts you for who you are and his family is the carnies and they need to stay hidden. Oh and also, just to fill in more plotholes (perhaps one of his dirt powers is the ability to fill plot holes?) it turns out that Danko killed Samuel's brother and one of the main reasons why the carnies need to move all over the place is that they are fleeing HRG. So, instant history between all our characters! Just add some disappearing lesbians, and you've got the lamest ending to the best subsubplot on Heroes this season.

Bay, Kurtzman and Orci's Batman
Pros: You'd get a new Batman movie every two years, even if Michael Bay would complain and tell people that he didn't want to make it but the studio offered him so much money he couldn't say no. Plus, with Bay attached, you know that they'd get to Catwoman as soon as humanly possible instead of this whole "I am a nihilist Joker" crap from The Dark Knight.
Cons: Kurtzman and Orci would probably take their Daddy issues (Fringe's Walter/Peter complicated relationship, Star Trek's Kirk trying to live up to his dead father's memory by self-destructing but then coming through as the hero he was destined to be, even Transformers' Optimus as Tough-But-Fair Robot Daddy to Shia's Sam Whitwicky) to pop culture's most parent-obsessed character, leading to the risk of a third act emotional breakthrough where Batman cries. There are enough Batman characters to make Revenge Of The Fallen seem understaffed, and the various personality tics of said Batman characters could lead to more unfunny schtick like the Twins and/or Jazz from the Transformers movies. Michael Bay possibly already sees himself as Bruce Wayne. Also, there's every possibility that the movie would make no sense whatsoever (See: Transformers, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen).

JJ Abrams' Terminator
Pros: Abrams' sense of kinetic, fun filmmaking is just what the franchise needs after Terminator Salvation - He's a sci-fi nerd who knows how to make successful popcorn movies full of tech that are really all about people; in other words, he's a younger James Cameron, before Cameron fell more in love with the tech involved in making movies. A Terminator-ized "Bad Robot" logo would be awesome. There'd probably be a Simon Pegg cameo.
Cons: Abrams' inability to not have a happy ending would mean that Skynet would be completely defeated by the time he was done, whether it was a movie or trilogy. The time travel core concept would allow him to reboot the series whenever he wanted, with Zachary Quinto as Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator. There'd probably be a Keri Russell cameo. Actually, fuck the cons. I really want to see Abrams do Terminator, the more I think about it.

Christopher Nolan's GI Joe
Pros: If anyone could give GI Joe some critical credibility, it's Christopher Nolan.
Cons: Nolan's attempt would probably be called A Real American Hero and would likely be three hours long, most of which would be spent filled with actors who should know better (Yes, Gary Oldman, we're looking at you) telling the audience how difficult it is to be a real American hero in a morally ambiguous world. There would be at least one subplot about abuse of military power to underscore the moral ambiguity until we move into the third act when the audience needs to get pumped and then Duke would abuse military power to stop the bad guy and then walk away in disgust in order to make a point that will be lost on the majority of an audience who were excited to see shit blow up finally. Cobra Commander would be so compelling that you'll start to wonder if he's wandered on set from a different, better, movie. Purists would complain about Snake Eyes' closing monologue about how difficult it is to be a ninja in the US military. No child would ever want to buy a GI Joe toy ever again.

Bryan Singer's Transformers
Pros: Singer's mix of geek cred and understanding of human drama/cheap angst is exactly what the Robots in Disguise need. His X-Men movies show that he can deal with large casts, and also keep the core of the original concepts and characters without getting weighed down by nostalgia. His Superman Returns shows that he, uh... knows Kevin Spacey, who could probably do a good Megatron voice? Okay, maybe not that last one.
Cons: Tom Cruise would end up playing Optimus Prime, and Ian McKellen would cameo as the Matrix of Leadership/Allspark/Creation Matrix/whatever the hell it's called these days. Singer would leave before the last film in the trilogy to go and make a Go-Bots movie about Leader-1 really being Jesus and stalking his ex-girlfriend.

McG's Dollhouse
Pros: Revamping Joss Whedon's television series into a stand-alone movie, McG would give interviews about really getting to the heart of the darkness at the center of the concept but then present a movie that's a series of comedic vignettes wherein Eliza Dushku, Lucy Liu and Ellen Page are sassy, independent girls who have to roleplay different personalities and lives while working undercover for D.O.L.L.house, a secret spy organization that pretends to brainwash people and rent them out to clients - with hilarious consequences!
Cons: Revamping Joss Whedon's television series into a stand-alone movie, McG would give interviews about really getting to the heart of the darkness at the center of the concept but then present a movie that's a series of comedic vignettes wherein Eliza Dushku, Lucy Liu and Ellen Page are sassy, independent girls who have to roleplay different personalities and lives while working undercover for D.O.L.L.house, a secret spy organization that pretends to brainwash people and rent them out to clients - with hilarious consequences!

Let's start with Electropolis, the new Dark Horse collection of Dean Motter's Retrofuture Deco Noir story (Preview here). Filled with robot detectives, femme fatales and the power of electricity, it's just one of many off-beat genre books appearing at comic book stores this week.

And if Electropolis' pulp fiction is your thing, then maybe the Batman/Doc Savage Special (Dark Knight Detective versus Man of Bronze!) will also float your boat, after all. Or maybe Sky Doll: Doll Factory, a collection of unseen material from the awesome European strip Sky Doll, will provide your reading material for the next few days.

But if you prefer your heroines a little less suggestible than Sky Doll, the first issue of Tank Girl: Skidmarks is probably more your speed. Unsurprisingly, we'd also point you in the direction of the debut of Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows, but we're biased.

Maybe you're looking for something you've already seen in major motion pictures? That's okay; not only is there a preview issue of the new series of Wall-E, but there's also Star Wars Purge: Seconds To Die, which follows a young Darth Vader killing off as many Jedi as possible, post Revenge of The Sith. And that's not all! There's also a paperback collection of DC/Wildstorm's recent The X-Files series.

For those who can't get enough of those superheroes, then I'd recommend the first issue of Warren Ellis' Supergod, his latest "What if superheroes were bastards?" series. Or, on the opposite end of the superhero spectrum, the Absolute Justice hardcover, collecting Alex Ross' expansive love letter to the Super Friends (No, really).

In between those two extremes, there's Dynamite's Project Superpowers: The Black Terror Vol. 1 collection, DC's Green Lantern: Agent Orange collection, which leads into the current Blackest Night storyline, Supergirl: Who Is Superwoman? (in which Sterling Gates and Jamil Igle manage to undo years of abuse and make Supergirl a likable, working character again - good job, people) and the Authority: The Lost Year Reader (reprinting Grant Morrison and Gene Ha's two completed issues of their abandoned run, ahead of Keith Giffen and other artists aiming to complete the story in their absence).

There's also Marvel's PunisherMax (Yes, one word. It's the new "mature readers" title for the character, and maybe Marvel thinks pushing words together is more adult?), Green Hulk/Red Hulk collection (Heroes' writer Jeph Loeb writes a couple of gamma-irradiated monsters in a couple of adventures), the first issue of Strange (Mark Waid's reboot of the former Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme). And also, there's all manner of X-Men books: the Dark Avengers/X-Men: Utopia collection, as well as collections of Wolverine: Tales of Weapon X, Wolverine Weapon X: Adamantium Men and Wolverine/Gambit. All your Wolverine needs should definitely be met this week, let's face it.

If there are any other needs looking unserviced, I'd recommend checking out the complete list of books shipping from Diamond Distributors this week, and then remembering that your local comic book store can be found here. If this week seems overly expensive, don't worry; there's an entire skip week at the end of the year to get some of that money back. Look at it as a loan. Or something.

V's success last week must feel confusing for the alphabet network; on the one hand, it was the second-highest rated series premiere of the season, and the most-watched 8pm premiere for ABC since Lost, but on the other, they'd already put the show on production hiatus and retooled things behind the scenes in a way that not only means they're unlikely to be able to bring the show back before the announced March 2010 return - thereby potentially losing whatever momentum the show will have at the end of this four episode mini-season - but also means that they've replaced many of the folk responsible for the show's success in the first place (Then again, who knows how many people liked what they saw last week and will return tomorrow?). Ever eager to help television networks out of a jam, we've come up with some possible ways to keep the V-mentum going while viewers wait for more Visitors:

Re-Edit Other, Little-Seen, Shows To Tie In With V
Got any police procedurals lying around? Just add an extra scene at the end where the perp turns out to get a cut on his hand and WTF HE'S A LIZARD MAN. Then you can cut to Elizabeth Mitchell getting a phone call and saying "Another one? Oh my God, they're everywhere." Cue dramatic music and cut to black. Pretend that it's an effort to show just how widespread the alien invasion actually is.

Re-Edit Episodes Of The Original V
Start each episode with Morena Baccarin talking to some minion Visitor and saying "You know, this reminds me of that time we invaded an Earth in a parallel dimension, and I had that long hair and 1980s evil bitch mask" before cutting to the original episode. Then, at the end, cap each episode off with Baccarin laughing and saying "Now, that was a sticky situation!"

Run Trailers For Lost Promising That It'll End With The Visitors Arriving On Earth
It's not like we have any better idea how Lost is going to end, let's face it. And, let's face it; like you can't already imagine the serious voiceover going "It started with a planecrash... But once they've solved the riddle of the island... They'll have to face the visitors." And then use Party of Five footage of Matthew Fox and Scott Wolf and pretend it's a flashback. Alternately...

Run Trailers Reminding People That They Could Just Watch Lost Instead
Again, cue the serious voiceover: "Waiting to find out what happens in V? Why? Lost is back on and it's much, much better. We promise that we'll throw Alan Tudyk in if it'll make a difference. Come on! It's the last season!"

Just Rename FlashForward
Am I the only person who thinks that FlashForward and V are long-lost brother shows? Both of them have worldwide events that shock humanity that are linked to terrorism and some believe prove the existence of God, both have FBI agents as central characters working to uncover the truth about said events, and both feature attractive people from as many different demographics as possible drawn into the web of slowly uncovering storylines. Considering that FlashForward's ratings are slipping, why not just edit in a new subplot that explains that the FlashForwards are really the result of Visitor experiments, show Dominic Monaghan peeling off his face to show that he's a lizard, and just call the show V from December onwards? Would anyone really care that much?

Here's the book's caption for the above image and our other images of that concept art:

The parallel reality of conceptual design - visions of the exotic bazaar a wandering Kirk might have stumbled upon in the film. In its final design, the desert planet becomes a threatening world of snow and ice.

So instead of seeing Kirk chased through the snow by the Cloverfield monster's cousin, we could have seen him encountering a slew of weird alien traders and smugglers on a desert world? I guess Abrams' film was already enough like Star Wars without this sequence.

Star Trek: The Art Of The Film, on sale next week, is Titan Books' latest coffee-table art book tying in with a major science fiction movie, and it's one of the best so far. You get insights into stuff you might not have thought about, like the many different head tattoos the film's scurvy-addled Romulan dogs sported in the film — there's a two-page spread showing all the different tattoos, just in case you and all your friends want to get done up as Nero's crew for a convention. It turns out that the U.S.S. Kelvin was originally designed to look like a Soviet submarine (there are some early renderings) and Nero's ship, the Narada, was supposed to be like a hundred scary knives. The Cloverfield monster in the film was origianlly hairier and more like Aggedor from Doctor Who.

We've already seen some gorgeous concept art from the film, but there's still some great stuff in the book I hadn't seen before — including some early paintings of Vulcan, and a huge section on the reimagining of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Images from Star Trek: The Art of the Film. Out November 17th from Titan Books.

People often lump Tierney together with George Will, as global-warming doubters at major newspapers who use somewhat specious arguments to downplay the scientific consensus that we're slow-cooking our planet. But Tierney's position as the Times' science columnist gives him more authority than Will's as a random TV pundit. But also, the thing I find fascinating about Tierney is that even as he goes to great lengths to paint the evidence about global warming as mere hype, he's also eager to buy into the hype whenever there's a claim that new technology will deliver us to a beautiful future, without having to make any hard choices. It's hard not to believe the two things are related.

Reading Tierney's columns and blog posts on global warming, a few things become clear. He's a global warming skeptic, rather than an out-and-out denier. (In one blog post, he says he believes there's "some risk" that global warming will be a danger.) But he's given tons of exposure and legitimacy to outright deniers, including some groups with ties to the oil industry. And he's done a lot to paint the scientific consensus on global warming as pure hype and conformism.

In Tierney's world, the reason the majority of scientists agree that global warming is a worsening crisis is dick-measuring. In a column on Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, Tierney spends most of the column quoting Roger Pielke, a climate researcher who's been one of the most vocal critics of the idea that the polar ice caps are melting. According to Pielke, scientists present conclusions about global warming as definitive not because the data supports them, but just to boost their own "authority in the political debate" and tarnish their opponents.

And Tierney implies that scientists sign on with the global-warming orthodoxy because that's where the money is. (One blog post is provocatively titled, "Global Warming Payola?".) And the idea that we're cooking the planet is sold to the public by taking advantage of natural disasters and tragic images of sad polar bears:

Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention - and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Recently, Tierney has also been pounding on the common conservative meme that the same scientists who now warn about global warming were warning, in the 1970s, that we faced a new human-made ice age. Since they were so wrong back then, and have changed their tune so drastically, the implication is, why should we believe them now? (The meme is massively overplayed, but even if it were true, so what? Smart people adjust their views when they receive new information. And when the data becomes overwhelming, only idiots and tools stay agnostic.)

You should definitely read Andrew Leonard's takedown (at Salon.com) of one of Tierney's columns, in which he basically claims that the more energy we use, the faster we'll solve any environmental problems — because we'll all get richer, and rich people demand clean air. (Shorter version: CO2 is odorless and colorless, so relying on wealthy people's distaste for smog won't do much good.)

I'm not just picking on Tierney because he's the science columnist at one of our biggest newspapers — I'm fascinated with him because while he paints global-warming concerns as pure hype, he's also one of the biggest boosters of the hype around the Singularity, as simplified by Ray Kurzweil and others. Reading Tierney's writing makes me wonder if the two things (skepticism on pressing, real problems, and wide-eyed enthusiasm for fictional, easy solutions) go hand in hand.

In fact, Tierney has explicitly pushed the idea of a technological Singularity, happening by 2030, as the alternative to neo-Malthusian warnings that overpopulation will result in starvation and environmental disasters. In one blog post, "Malthus Vs. The Singularity," Tierney cites a paper by Robin Hanson in the IEEE Spectrum saying that the Singularity could speed up our economic growth so much, our economy would double within a month. (Or even a week.) Says Tierney, this provides an alternative to that downer Malthusian view:

Now, you could argue that his projections of artificial intelligence are as speculative and unprecedented as the Malthusian visions of resource depletion. But I'd bet on him over the Malthusians. Unlike Malthus, we can look around and see that we already have the energy and technology to feed a larger population than exists on Earth today. And we can look at Ray Kurzweil's graphs showing exponential growth in computing power for more than a century, with no apparent end in sight.

Here's a smaller version of the Ray Kurzweil graph he's talking about:

Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, was a frequent touchstone in Tierney's column and blog posts in the summer of 2008, although not so much since then. And the idea that you can extrapolate from existing trends in computing power into the next century is a cornerstone of Kurzweil's prediction that machines smarter than humans are coming in the next few decades. (Actually, the graph maps "calculations per second per $1,000," which seems a tad arbitrary — and how do you measure how many human brains $1,000 will buy you?)

Tierney eagerly seizes on Kurzweil's predictions that rapidly accelerating technological advances will solve all of our problems — he's devoted a column and at least one blog post to Kurzweil's Law Of Accelerating Returns, which says that progress has been speeding up since the beginning of life on Earth. (There are more charts, which show the timeline between multi-cellular organisms and the development of mammals, versus between the Industrial Revolution and the development of the personal computer. Guess which took longer?) According to Kurzweil, the time between Paradigm Shifts has been halving with each decade, and soon our paradigms will be shifting constantly.

Among other things, that means we'll have unlimited clean energy soon, life expectancy will start shooting up every year "faster than you're aging," and all of our problems will be solved. In another blog post, Tierney addresses his commenters who doubt Kurzweil's Law. (Don't they realize it's a Law?):

In response to my Findings column about [Kurzweil] and a post about his graphs, some readers were skeptical. Francis and others insisted it's naive to assume exponential progress can go on - that, just as bacteria proliferating in a petri dish will eventually exhaust the resources, we too will hit a limit.

I think these skeptics are missing the lessons of history, but before explaining why I like Mr. Kurzweil's theory more than theirs, let me grant them a couple of points. First, there is no guarantee that exponential increases in computer power will continue, or that the exponential growth in computer science will be matched in other fields. One of the most common mistakes of technoprophets is to assume that the the technology du jour will shape the future. When radio was invented, futurists envisioned locomotives powered by radio waves; when atomic power was discovered, there were predictions of nuclear-powered car in every garage.

Also, futurists tend to underestimate the social and political obstacles to progress, so they're often too optimistic about how soon people's lives will be transformed. Just because new tools exist doesn't mean they'll be used widely. Donald Norman, a technology expert profiled in my Findings column in December, says the chief problems to overcome in introducing new technologies involve people, not machines.

That said, after watching the impact of computers on so many fields, I share Mr. Kurzweil's belief that these tools are especially transformative and that change is just going to accelerate. Yes, there are physical limits to what can done with computer chips. But for a century now, each time computer engineers ran into previous physical limits - with the original electro-mechanical machines, with vacuum tubes, with transistors - they jumped to a new technology, and they're already working on successors to today's chips. It may seem naive to expect continuing leaps forward, but I think it's naive to ignore the trend of the past century - or the past 10,000 years.

The Cassandras have been warning of limits and resource depletion and population crashes for thousands of years, but as Julian Simon explained, we've kept exceeding limits and finding new resources and extending our life expectancy. The new problems lead to new solutions that leave us better off in the long run. Today's Cassandras are focused on climate change, which could bring real problems, but to think these problems are insurmountable seems to me as short-sighted as the prophecies of the 1960s ("overpopulation" leading to worldwide famines) and 1970s (the exhaustion of energy supplies).

If anything, climate change seems much more manageable than previous "crises" because the chief consequences are so far in the future. We have decades to figure out ways to deal with it: to find carbon-free sources of energy, to develop techniques for removing carbon from the atmosphere or geoengineering the climate, or simply to adapt. These are all formidable challenges, but our tools for dealing with them are going to be improving exponentially, as Mr. Kurzweil argues.

So once again, you see the connection — even as Tierney says that we have decades to figure out what to do about climate change, he's also tremendously excited about a Singularity in which all our troubles will melt away and magic robots will carry us into the cyber-heaven on their shoulders. Rather than viewing the Singularity as a huge disruption, one which we can't possibly understand in advance, as many science fiction writers have done, Tierney buys into the hype that the Singularity will give us unlimited rice pudding.

You'll notice the mention of "geoengineering" in that last paragraph — it's another one of Tierney's favorite pie-in-the-sky themes. If it really does turn out that CO2 in the atmosphere is causing some problems, there's a potential fix that doesn't involve making any sacrifices:

Originally called geoengineering, this approach used to be dismissed as science fiction fantasies: cooling the planet with sun-blocking particles or shades; tinkering with clouds to make them more reflective; removing vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.

Today this approach goes by the slightly less grandiose name of climate engineering, and it is looking more practical. Several recent reviews of these ideas conclude that cooling the planet would be technically feasible and economically affordable.

Possible ideas include lofting aerosol particles into the ionosphere to reflect shortwave radiation back into space, spraying seawater mist into low-lying clouds, to brighten them and reflect sunlight away from the Earth, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Scientists have pooh-poohed the idea of geoengineering because — wait for it! — they don't want to lose the prestige and money they've gotten from warning about carbon emissions. But there are real reasons to think that geo-engineering without reduction in carbon emissions would be worse than doing nothing — and that's if it even succeeds. Futurist Jamais Cascio, author of Hacking The Earth, writes in the Wall Street Journal recently:

To be clear, geoengineering won't solve global warming. It's not a "techno-fix." It would be enormously risky and almost certainly lead to troubling unforeseen consequences. And without a doubt, the deployment of geoengineering would lead to international tension. Who decides what the ideal temperature would be? Russia? India? The U.S.? Who's to blame if Country A's geoengineering efforts cause a drought in Country B?

Also let's be clear about one other thing: We will still have to radically reduce carbon emissions, and do so quickly. We will still have to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and adopt substantially more sustainable agricultural methods. We will still have to deal with the effects of ecosystems damaged by carbon overload...

[Geoengineering] would simply hold temperatures down temporarily, doing nothing about the causes of climate change, let alone ocean acidification and other symptoms of a carbon overdose. We can't let ourselves slip back into business-as-usual complacency, because we'd simply be setting ourselves up for a far greater disaster down the road.

Cascio explains further here:

I'm an optimistic person — but my optimism comes from a faith that we, as human beings, will figure out a way to change what we're doing before it's too late. I don't believe there are magical "get out of eco-hell free" cards lying around, or that the Singularity is going to solve all of our problems. The Singularity has given us some fantastic science-fiction novels by people like Vernor Vinge, Rudy Rucker and Charles Stross — but it's not going to come true, any more than the novels 1984 or 2001 were accurate descriptions of those years in real life. But even if computers did become smarter than humans in 100 years' time — for some values of "smarter" — I'm not sure that would save us from the results of our own fecklessness. For one thing, who's to say those super-smart computers would care whether the Earth was habitable for humans?

You can certainly look at our history, as a species, and see an unbroken line of progress. But you can also see many eras where we've driven ourselves into a technological hole (the Dark Ages come to mind) or engineered ourselves into mass starvation (China's Great Leap Forward was a purely human-made catastrophe.) There's certainly no guarantee that we get to have an unbroken upward progression going on for ever and ever.

We'll get a beautiful future — but only if we work for it. The idea that a wonderful, shining future will be handed to us, or that the awful dilemmas we're facing as a species will just go away, feels worse than foolish. It feels like sabotaging the future, for the sake of a bit more comfort and a false sense of security today.

If Tierney only used his bully pulpit at the Times to raise doubts about global warming, he'd just be one of many obstacles to saving our planet. But the fact that he's simultaneously guzzling the Kool Aid on things like Ray Kurzweil's Panglossian Law of Perfect Awesomeness and the mad-science easy fix for global warming makes him something much worse. His cheery outlook is actually helping to ruin our future.

Monday

What better way to start off the week than with a Syfy marathon of Stargate SG-1 running right now, from 8am all the way through to 3pm? Sure, there's that whole "work" thing, but come on. It's Stargate!

Otherwise, your television thrills are limited to an 8pm conflict between new episodes of House on Fox (A teenage girl can't distinguish between fact and fiction "after a wild night out." Am I the only one who feels like this could be either awesome or hideously embarrassing for all involved?) and Heroes on NBC, where Sylar is still trying to take control of Matt's body and Claire has to face off with her father's Sorority Girl Army. And, yes, I did accidentally make that sound more interesting than the actual show. Sorry, everyone.

Tuesday

For those calling in sick, I'd recommend skipping Syfy's Tru Calling marathon (8am through 3pm for those whose love of Dushku overpowers their bad-show gag reflex) and tuning into AMC, which goes dragon crazy with a 12:45 airing of Dragonheart (Dennis Quaid and a dragon voiced by Sean Connery!) followed by a 3pm re-run of Reign of Fire (You could stay tuned for a 5pm Batman Begins and 8pm Terminator 2: Judgment Day as well, if you were feeling particularly lazy).

If you'd rather get a delayed British take on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, then James May On The Moon (BBC America at 8pm) takes Top Gear's Captain Slow and puts him in the driver's seat for an hour long look back at those heady days where men were men and the Moon seemed an obtainable destination.

Otherwise, click over to ABC for the second episode of V and see whether it still feels like FlashForward meets... Well, the old V, really (The official PR for the episode says "A seeker among the Visitors tracks Erica and Father Jack. Chad seeks redemption by investigating the aliens ahead of his next newscast while law enforcers press Erica for information concerning Dale M…").

Wednesday

Thank God for Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel at 9pm. Without their investigation into whether cars will automatically burst into flames after crashing (Surely we have empirical proof that the answer is no already?), I'd have to find some way to pretend that Glee (Fox at 9) was a scifi show just to have something to write about for today. I figured I could always claim that it was set in an alternate reality where people aren't creeped out by Will Schuester trying to rap.

Thursday
If it's Thursday, then it's time for all the shows to run up against each other again. Sure, you could pretend that the networks aren't showing anything and watch a double bill of Demolition Man and End of Days on AMC (Sly and Arnold! In two of their most underrated - for a reason - movies! It starts at 8pm, if you're tempted), after spending the day watching Syfy's Star Trek: Enterprise marathon (8am through 3pm, as ever), but come on. I know that you can't resist the big shows people are talking about.

On FlashForward (ABC, 8pm), Aaron discovers the truth about his daughter's death, Janis returns to work and Mark and Olivia's martial troubles bring everyone down yet again, man. Things are much more fun over in Mystic Falls where Vampire Diaries (the CW at 8pm) brings a mysterious new teacher, arguments over medallions and, according to the CW, "Damon finally reveals to Stefan the stunning reason he has returned to Mystic Falls." If I watched the show and/or cared, I couldn't wait!

9pm brings the real reason to wrestle over the remote; Fringe on Fox gives Olivia, Broyles and Peter a new reason to be suspicious of Massive Dynamic when the impossibly shady corporation turn out to be involved in a kidnapping case, but Supernatural (The CW) looks much more fun than even Walter Bishop could provide:

Super fan Becky uses Chuck's phone to trick Sam and Dean into attending a Supernatural fan convention, complete with fans dressed up as Sam and Dean. One of the activities is a live action role-playing game, but things quickly turn sour after a real ghost appears on the scene.

Seriously. How could anyone resist that?

Friday

Jericho fans! You have the Syfy marathon of the day (8am through 3pm, which I'm sure you already know by now) to keep you happy during the daylight hours; the rest of us will be watching the original The War Of The Worlds movie on AMC at 10:15am (And avoiding the following Star Trek: Nemesis at 12:15pm, a movie which can best be described by blogger Kevin Church here), instead.

Still, Friday evening starts the weekend off right with the double bill of Batman: The Brave and The Bold ("The Fate of Equinox!" Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (following last week's surprisingly brutal, "Are Jedi really advocating using flame throwers against living beings what the hell?" episode) on Cartoon Network, starting at 7:30pm (Clone Wars is at 8pm, if you have an aversion of Batman. And if you do, then I'm very, very sorry.)

If you're in the mood for MOR dramas teasing the supernatural, then CBS is the place to be tonight, with new episodes of both Ghost Whisperer (8pm, with Jennifer Love Hewitt "pulled into a murder mystery by a real estate power couple" - Yes, this is what people want to watch, apparently) and Medium (9pm, which at least includes a potentially amusing-for-the-wrong-reasons subplot about posting videos of someone on the internet and "getting into trouble") on offer.

The rest of us, we'll be considering Smallville on the CW at 8pm (It features the Wonder Twins! You know you want to), Stargate Universe on Syfy at 9pm (The crew of the Destiny get a message from their future selves from the past. Or something) and Sanctuary on the same channel at 10pm.

Saturday

If you're not looking forward to Syfy's Ice Twisters at 9pm ("A sci-fi novelist is summoned to help scientists after an experiment in weather manipulation goes awry and produces deadly tornadoes made of ice," apparently), then we'd suggest that AMC's double bill of trilogies is the best way to spend your day. Start with the Mad Max trilogy (Movies starting 1:30, 3:30 and 5:30pm) before a night of The Matrix trilogy (The three movies begin at 8pm, 11pm and 1am on Sunday, respectively). Otherwise, the only thing left is Discovery's Surviving 2012... which is about all the prophecies, and not, sadly, advice on making it through Roland Emmerich's latest.

Sunday

It's the best night of television this week! Who knew, right? Start things off right with Syfy's latest screening of Serenity at 6:30 before switching over midway through - Hopefully missing Alan Tudyk's least favorite scene ever in the process - to catch the premiere of AMC's brand new take on The Prisoner at 8pm. If Ian McKellan and Jim Caviezel can't bring Patrick McGoohan's classic paranoiafest back to life, I'm going to be very depressed.

Of course, the best way to finish the evening off is coming at midnight, with the latest episode of The Venture Bros on Cartoon Network. Can we all just admit that it's the smartest and funniest show on television already?

If you are a process junkie, then the boxset is made for you; along with a lovely booklet full of production sketches, each episode has an additional mini-documentary with interviews from the crew involved, as well as seven episodes with new material added for "Director's Cut" editions (Spoiler: Han doesn't shoot first in any of them). More to the point, just rewatching the series shows how the show has evolved as everyone learns what they can, and can't, get away with; I watched the first few episodes in the set after watching "Landing At Point Rain," the most recent episode of the second season, and the difference is amazing - and, for a second, somewhat damning to the first season in comparison ("Point Rain" featured not just some wonderfully choreographed battle sequences that offered a fluidity and grace that the earlier animation lacked, it was also surprisingly brutal in tone - The clones and Jedi used flamethrowers on their alien opponents and you saw them burning to death, which really leaves the earliest episodes of the show, uncertain about the tone just yet, looking anemic). But to concentrate on how far the show's come is to miss the point, and the fun, of the first season.

Clone Wars season one was full of trial and error, yes, but even when things didn't work, they're still worth watching - even moreso on DVD, when the bad taste of the Jar-Jar-centric "Bombad Jedi" is quickly washed away by the double bill of "Cloak of Darkness" and "Lair of Grievous," both of which move more towards the self-assured tone of the movies. The show's mini-arcs make more sense when viewed together, as well (And episodes like "Storm Over Ryloth," "Innocents of Ryloth" and "Liberty on Ryloth" work better than the feature that introduced the series in the first place). But as much as the writing shifts and grows in quality and confidence throughout the series - Just compare the Ryloth episodes to "Ambush" to see what I mean - so, in a much more subtle way, do the visuals.

Never less than impressive, even from the get-go (Just look at some of the textures used! Or the lighting! Man, it's good stuff), the animators nonetheless manage to tighten things all the way throughout the season by, ironically, loosening up: The "acting" by the characters - especially the facial movements - gets more natural as the show goes on, making it easier to empathize with the characters despite (because of) their impressive and intentional cartoony quality (Again, this is something that's all the more obvious looking at newer episodes like "Point Rain," where Anakin has some great subtle smirking going on, adding to his "Yeah, you're a hero now but you're going to end up Darth Vader because of that assholishness, buddy" thing).

But even outside of the "Watch the show improve" aspect that made the boxset for me - I couldn't help it, I'd seen the shows before - there's a lot to like about The Complete Season One; yes, some of the episodes (Ahem, "Bombad Jedi") are clunkers, but the good outweigh the bad, and there's something to like in all of them. The bonus features, as I've said before, are worth watching (Especially the "Jedi Temple" extras, which I think are BluRay only?), and the format makes the multi-episode arcs much stronger than they were when first broadcast, even without the addition of the extra footage.

In the end, then, there's something in The Complete Season One for almost everyone: Complete nerds like me get to geek out over the evolution of the show and peeks behind the scenes, casual fans who liked the series on television can enjoy the Director's Cut episodes and watching the arcs in one sitting, and newcomers... Well, they just get a pretty good cartoon that's, for the most part, more enjoyable than the prequel trilogy. Me, I'm already waiting for the Complete Season Two boxset to hear how they managed to get away with torching their enemies on Cartoon Network prime time.

Spock
Died: Sacrificing himself by bringing the warp engines back online at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, leading to his dying from exposure to radiation.
Undied: His body was resurrected in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock thanks to the Deus Ex Machina powers of the Genesis Planet, and it turned out that his soul had lived on all along thanks to mind melding with Bones.
Cause of Undeath: Mind-meld and blatant plot ridiculousness in order to keep the fans happy. Admittedly, it was all set up in Star Trek II, but still.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, his soul was alive the entire time in Bones, but his body had enough time to go through a funeral and being shot off into space, so... 50/50? But not really, let's face it.

Ellen Tigh
Died: Poisoned by her husband after (in his eyes) betraying humanity in "Exodus, Part II" at the start of Battlestar Galactica's third season.
Undied: Instantly downloaded into a new body as part of the Fifth Cylon retcon, as revealed in the fourth season's "Sometimes A Great Notion."
Cause of Undeath: Traditional cylon download/rebirth.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, she was instantly reborn, which suggests that she was never actually dead as such, but the whole Fifth Cylon thing muddies the waters... especially when she was reborn as someone who wasn't exactly the Ellen she was when she died. We're going with "Kinda, but not really."

Boba Fett
Died: Falling into the Sarlacc's mouth in Return Of The Jedi.
Undied: Climbing back out of the Sarlacc's mouth in comic sequel Star Wars: Dark Empire.
Cause of Undeath: He was swallowed by apparently never chewed or digested and climbed his way out, apparently.
Does It Count As Death?: If you believe Dark Empire, not in the slightest. George Lucas apparently disagrees, however; it's said that he edited Fett's last appearance in the special edition of Return Of The Jedi to make it clearer that it's meant to be the end of the character.

John Sheridan
Died: Avoiding certain death by nuclear explosion at the end of Babylon 5's third season finale, "Z'ha'dum," by jumping into a pit so deep that it was impossible to survive. Oh, and then there was that nuclear explosion, which presumably would've destroyed the pit and everything within it anyway.
Undied: At the start of the show's fourth season, Sheridan was revealed to be in a limbo between life and death because of his love for Delenn. With the help of - and 20 years worth of lifeforce from - helpful fellow limbo-ite Lorien, he comes back to the land of the living.
Cause of Undeath: As Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting would say, choosing life. Who knew it was that simple?
Does It Count As Death?: Nope. Think of it as getting as far as death's foyer, before deciding to turn back because you'd changed your mind.

Tasha Yar
Died: Wanting out of her Starfleet contract early, Denise Crosby got her character killed at the hands of a gloopy, ooky oil monster in the first season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation "Skin of Evil."
Undied: Thanks to time travel shenanigans, turns out never to have died in the alternate timeline of third season episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," and then manages to return to the past of the original timeline at the end of the episode in a way that still doesn't make a lot of sense.
Cause of Undeath: Alternate timelines having prevented her from dying in the first place.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, a Tasha Yar definitely died. In fact, as we learn upon the appearance of the second Yar's daughter Sela, the other Tasha was killed unsuccessfully trying to escape from the Romulans, so it looks as if any and all Tashas would end up dead one way or another.

Superman
Died: At the hands of the apparently unstoppable Doomsday in 1993's The Death of Superman storyline.
Undied: Midway through the follow-on The Return of Superman storyline, when it's been revealed that none of the four characters who've taken up the mantle are the real thing.
Cause of Undeath: He woke up. No, really; the audience is pretty much told that he'd never died in the first place, he'd just gone into superhibernation in order to heal from the fight.
Does It Count As Death?: Not at all, but it definitely counted as a moneyspinner for DC Comics, who went on to kill Green Arrow and Green Lantern within the next couple of years, as well as teasing deaths for the Flash and breaking Batman's back.

Bucky
Died: Trapped on a bomb that mentor and Nazi-fighting partner Captain America had managed to jump off of before it exploded, as explained way back in 1963's Avengers series.
Undied: In 2005's "Winter Soldier" storyline of Captain America, where he got reintroduced and prepped to become the new Captain America in 2007.
Cause of Undeath: Turns out that Bucky was, in fact, blown to bits by the exploding bomb... It's just that they were pretty large bits. Large enough to rebuild him into a brainwashed no-good commie assassin who gets put on ice between missions, until he meets Cap, goes rogue, remembers who he is, and then uses his mighty Russian technology for the good of American mankind.
Does It Count As Death?: What's brainwashed Russian assassin for no?

The Flash
Died: Which one? Barry Allen died in 1985's Crisis On Infinite Earths. Wally West disappeared and was, at various times, presumed dead/missing/no-one could make up their mind in 2004's Infinite Crisis, and Bart Allen kicked the bucket in 2007's The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #13.
Undied: Wally came back in 2007's Justice League of America #10, Barry in 2008's Final Crisis #1 and Bart in 2009's Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #4.
Cause of Undeath: Both Barry and Wally had, it turns out, never died. Barry had been swallowed into the Speed Force, which is the cosmic... thing... that gives all super-speed characters their powers in the DC Universe, while Wally's fate was ultimately (after a couple of failed attempts that were quickly contradicted) decided upon a variation of "He took his family on vacation to an alien planet and didn't tell anyone." Don't ask. Bart, meanwhile, did die, kind of... but his teenage self was trapped in a futuristic lightning rod and then magically released in the 31st century to fight Superboy Prime. Again, it's probably better if you didn't ask.
Does It Count As Death?: No question for either Barry or Wally (No), but Bart... I have no idea. I've read Legion of Three Worlds multiple times, and still don't understand the explanation that's given there; let's just never mention it again and pretend it didn't happen.

Jason Todd
Died: As the result of a real-life phone vote to see if Todd, the second Robin (as in Batman and), should be killed at the hands of the Joker. Seriously, 1988's comic industry, what the hell were you thinking?
Undied: 2004's Batman revealed that Todd was not only not dead, but had magically aged more than most other characters in the DC Universe in his off-panel absence.
Cause of Undeath: Superboy was punching the walls of reality, and things went a bit weird. You know how it is with these superheroes and their punching the walls of reality; history gets rewritten all over the place. Just be glad that Batman didn't end up as Batdinosaur. Although, now that we think about it, that'd be awesome.
Does It Count As Death?: Magically contradicting Schrodinger and his cat, Jason Todd both did and didn't die. His official history has it that he died, and then just came back to life thanks to the punching of reality, meaning that he was still alive. So, while it ultimately doesn't count as permanent death, there was a death in there somewhere.

Jean Grey
Died: In 1980's famous Uncanny X-Men #137, where she sacrifices herself for the good of the universe to stop herself from becoming overwhelmed by the godlike power she possessed that might lead her to eat a couple of planets if she got peckish.
Undied: It's revealed in 1986's Fantastic Four #286 that the Jean Grey who killed herself was never actually Jean Grey at all, but the Phoenix force, who's been cosmically imprinted with Jean's personality. Don't worry; the Phoenix force was already back by that point anyway.
Cause of Undeath: Jean hadn't died (at that point), and the resurrection of the Phoenix force was somewhat implied by the name - The official explanation was that the Phoenix force hadn't actually died either, just lain dormant until someone else (Jean's daughter from an alternate timeline. If you don't already know, don't ask) claimed it.
Does It Count As Death?: Before the retcon and ruined Chris Claremont's X-Men once and for all you bastards, it did. Now? No-one died until years later, when Jean really got the Phoenix power and then ended up dying anyway. Guess there's something unlucky about the name or something.

Both Fringe and FlashForward are seeing ratings in a worrying freefall right now; Meredith has already reported that Fringe was being considered a show in "trouble," but that was before the audience dropped a worrying 23% for this Thursday's episode (In its defense, many people may have been unaware that it was even on; a lot of schedules didn't list the episode, instead telling viewers that it was the seventh game of the World Series). Seeing a less dramatic drop, but still something that's started rumors of a lack of second season renewal, FlashForward slumped even further this week and, as TV By The Numbers showed, continued a speedy decline in the number of viewers each week towards the point of no return.

We already know that Thursday is a packed night of television, but is it so packed that it's going to kill shows we love (or, in the case of FlashForward, like enough to keep watching and hoping for the best)? Or will the success of the V premiere remind networks that Tuesday night is always an option?

[Alexis Rockman via {feuilleton}]

Disney World I
Disney World II
Capitol Hill
Church and White
East 82nd St.
Gateway Arch
Hollywood
Hollywood at Night
Hotelscape
Manifest Destiny
Mount Rushmore
Miami
Vie en Rose
Washington Square

Magical Realism
Air
What It's About: At its heart, Air is a love story between Blythe - a flight attendant who's afraid of flying - and Zayn, who is as much a mystery to himself as everyone else. But Air is much, much weirder, and more interesting, than that: For one thing, Blythe is a natural hyperpraxis pilot, which means that she can travel to places, times and ideas that don't, theoretically, exist... a skill she's honing with the help of Amelia Earhart, who by the way is still alive. For another, there's a war brewing between terrorists over control of the skies, and for a third, certain people may be very interested in that whole "hyperpraxis" thing. A series that's gentle, human, full of wonder and emotion, and at times just beautiful, Air is unlike most comics - and television shows and movies, for that matter - out there.
Where To Start: Two collections are available, Letters From Lost Countries and Flying Machine. Pick both up; the series is great, but the first collection (Letters) stops at a frustratingly bad point, and you need to read the second to fully appreciate what's going on.
Click here for a preview of Air.

Post-Invasion SF
Resurrection
What It's About: We've all seen stories about aliens invading Earth, but what happens after they leave? FlashForward producer and Green Lantern movie scriptwriter Marc Guggenheim's series starts with that idea and spins out a series that's part Y: The Last Man, part Lost and all-over fascinating. Why did the aliens invade? Where did they go? No-one knows yet, but considering they've left behind technology and even one of their own, you can sure that we'll probably find out somewhere down the line... but along the way, you can get sucked into the more down to earth stories of the humans left behind. Even if one of them is former president Bill Clinton, who was revealed to be more alive than everyone thought at the end of the most recent issue.
Where To Start: There's already a collection of the first black and white series out there, but we'd actually recommend waiting until the start of next year, when the 368 page Resurrection Vol 1: Deluxe Edition, featuring the complete first series and the first seven issues of the current series, hits the shelves.
Click here for a preview of Resurrection.

Urban Fantasy
Locke & Key
What It's About: Ignore the punniness of the premise - The Locke family move to the family estate of Keyhouse, wherein there are magic keys that can do various weird and wonderful things, which puts them right in the middle of some bad things that're about to happen - and instead, embrace and enjoy those weird and wonderful things that the keys can do: like open doors that turn people into ghosts or even open their own heads so that you can reach in and take out unpleasant memories. Mixing horror, fantasy, comedy and family drama and featuring moments that are genuinely unsettling, Locke & Key deserves all the praise it's gotten, and a lot more.
Where To Start: There're two collections out already; Welcome To Lovecraft and Head Games. Start at the beginning (Lovecraft), bearing in mind that Head Games is the better, and also the more freaky.
Click here for a preview of Locke & Key.

Nostalgia Done Right
Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka
What It's About: A reimagining of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy (with some nods to his other work thrown in), Naoki Urasawa's Pluto is inventive, dramatic and in almost every single way, a lesson in how to take reboot and update an old concept the right way. Instead of retreading the old status quo, the series centers around robot detective Gesicht, who's investigating the murder of various high profile robots around the world... Murders that may have been committed by another robot. Even if you don't get sucked in by the economy and subtlety of the writing, there's no way you could fail to admire Urasawa's amazing artwork.
Where To Start: Unsurprisingly, Vol. 1. The seventh volume of the series is due in January, but that's still too far away; when you finish the first volume, you'll be hooked and get through the other five in days.
(No preview available, due to licensing issues. Sorry.)

Crime/Romance/SF/Everything
King City
What It's About: I've written before about Brandon Graham's stunning future crime book, but now that it's being re-released in an easier-to-find serialization by Image Comics, I'll use the opportunity to gush again; the bastard child of an orgy that included Moebius, Vaughn Bode, Jamie Hewlett and Osamu Tezuka (and maybe a little Alex Toth, come to think of it), King City is the tale of one thief, his broken heart, his cat that can literally do anything if given the right drugs, werewolves with war trauma, stolen organs, sidekicks in wrestling masks and pretty much all that's good in the world, all wrapped in something that takes noir's cliches and gives them a makeover laced with enough absurdity and love that it all seems new again. The whole thing manages to be both laid back and electrifyingly kinetic, and your heart will break for multiple reasons while reading it. Really, really worth tracking down.
Where To Start: The serialized reissue is on #2, so picking up back issues from the start really shouldn't be a problem. The original Tokyopop release may offer more story in one sitting, but the Image re-release comes with bigger pages and brand new material to accompany the serialized reprint.
Click here for a preview of King City.

Surprisingly, the issue was raised with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs earlier this week, as Mediaite's Tommy Christopher risked lizard attack by asking whether or not the President had a statement on the issue:

Tommy Christopher: Robert, I have one question and one clarification. First, the new TV series on ABC, "V," a lot of people are talking about how this show draws very strong –

Gibbs: I got to tell you - I'm going to start with this: I don't want to give anybody the impression I have time to watch anything other than what most of you all do each night. So I can't even tell you what that is or what it's about. If that makes me fairly un-cool, I tend to watch more "SpongeBob" than "V."

Tommy Christopher:There have been a lot of news stories about this –

Gibbs: Makes me a hit with one six-year-old, and that really is all that counts.

Tommy Christopher: You haven't seen the news stories about how this show compares your administration to the alien invaders? (Laughter.) Seriously, really, you haven't heard about it?

Q: He couldn't admit it if he had. (Laughter.)

Gibbs: Because there's a chip in the back of my head that requires me - (laughter) - I don't mean to - I honestly - I got to tell you, I spend - I watch a little football on Saturday, a little football on Sunday, and a lot of news every other time.

Q: Get a life. (Laughter.)

Q: (Inaudible).

Gibbs: Pardon me?

Tommy Christopher: Fourteen million people watch it, and the show –

Gibbs: And clearly, me not being one of them. Again, I –

[Cross-talk.] (Laughter.)

Gibbs: Hold on. I'm not entirely sure who I'd check on since I don't watch the show.

Tommy Christopher: Well, check with the President, see if he has a reaction –

Gibbs: I will assume that the President watches –

Tommy Christopher:– comparing him to a space alien.

Gibbs: What's the - which would probably, like, be one of the least worst things he's been called today.

The exchange ended with Gibbs being promised a tape of the show to review from ABC's Jake Tapper, which, if nothing else, should give ABC something new to promote the show with next week: "Officially screened at the White House at request of the President!"

Here's hoping that his often-discussed love for sci-fi will get him through the derivative hour without being too distracted by a cast that includes Firefly, Dollhouse, Lost, The 4400 and Smallville refugees.

White House Is Thus Far Unaware Of Comparisons To ABC's Hit Show ‘V' [Mediaite]

The news broke in The Wall Street Journal, of all places, in a story about toy lines being co-opted by movie studios:

J.J. Abrams, who created the TV show "Lost" and directed this summer's "Star Trek" film, is in discussions to produce a movie about Japanese toy line Micronauts, which Hasbro just acquired.

With Abrams producing, that opens the door for some Kurtzman/Orci involvement, if they could be convinced to jump from the Transformers franchise into another toy universe. We're really keeping our fingers crossed for comic artist and Micronaut lover Paul Pope getting involved on the design side, though.

The Cry Goes Out in Hollywood: 'Get Me Mr. Potato Head's Agent!' [Wall Street Journal]

Based on 70s short story by Richard Matheson, who also wrote I Am Legend, the movie's central premise is simple. A strangely-disfigured man named Arlington offers a strange proposition to a young family. If they press the button on a box he leaves with them, somebody they don't know will die and they will receive $1 million in cash. School teacher Norma and her NASA engineer husband Arthur aren't sure what to do when the mysterious Arlington leaves them to make their decision. Is the box a hoax? If not, is it bad to kill somebody they don't know if it means they'll have enough money to continue their comfortable, middle-class existence?

With Arthur's dreams of becoming an astronaut dashed (he failed the psychological test), and Norma unable to continue getting a discount for their son at the fancy private school where she teaches, money has recently become a source of anxiety for the couple. So Norma decides to press the button, though Arthur is immediately upset that she does it.

Once this fundamental plot point fades into the narrative background, cult auteur Kelly is free to do what he does best: Get weird. He slowly builds a portrait of suburban life haunted by a mystical military-industrial complex ruled by aliens and spies. Another NASA employee's wife is brutally murdered while their daughter cowers upstairs, and Arthur suspects it's because of Norma's button pushing. Meanwhile, people with nosebleeds are spying on the couple, as well as speaking in portentious tones about "going into the light."

Arlington continues to keep them under surveillance, and they discover that he's actually with the NSA. He built the box after being struck by lightning and mysteriously brought back from the dead. And it all has something to do with the Mars probe Voyager that Arthur helped design.

The movie is packed with the memorable, strange imagery that is Kelly's trademark. Boxes made of water hover in the air, a perfect recreation of a low-tech 1970s library becomes a haunting maze, and the NASA sets are lovingly rendered, complete with retro computers and lens flare. And the eponymous box itself is designed like some kind of Cold War objet d'art. Balanced atop a 70s-style wood panel box is a big red button that looks like it could launch nukes.

Kelly manages to weave together mystical moral issues with government conspiracies and godlike alien intelligences, but the result is uneven. It's hard to sympathize with a comfortably middle-class couple who are willing to kill somebody just so they can continue to live in a giant house and send their son to private school. And the moral universe Kelly has created in The Box is woefully black-and-white: Either you push the button and you're bad, or you don't push it and you're good. I kept waiting for Donnie Darko to step out from behind a curtain and yell at everybody for trying to reduce all human problems to the bland binary of "fear" vs. "love."

We also discover that the button is always pushed by wives, which suggests that women are the culprits holding humanity back from achieving the level of moral goodness that the aliens require in order to spare us from annihilation.

Despite these problems, there were flashes of goofy brilliance in The Box. Especially in the woefully short segments where we see Arlington's mysterious laboratory, located in a wind tunnel that the NSA has requisitioned from NASA, we get a glimpse of a truly great science fiction story. Arlington and his "employees" are a more deeply strange and stylized version of characters from Fringe, and that's a good thing. There's an especially great moment when one of Arlington's puppets returns to the alien spy installation at a tiny freeway motel, which is packed with other alien-controlled people and partly papered over with tinfoil. There's even a cheesy motel pool that's been improbably converted into an alien portal.

Kelly is at his best when he's making mind-melting science fiction with allegorical underpinnings, but unfortunately The Box is more like a morality play with a few science fiction characters hanging around in the background. Making matters worse is that the moral here seems like easy, unimaginative misanthropy. Unlike Kelly's previous films, which bristle with complicated hopefulness in the face of horror, The Box paints a simplistically dark picture of humanity. Despite the best of intentions, women keep pressing that button again and again - putting their families in danger, and dooming Earth to a harsh judgment from the godlike aliens.

Why are such complicated characters doomed to be inserted into narrative boxes that only clumsily contain them? Unfortunately, The Box doesn't answer that question.

Make It Impossible

The first rule to come from the director was, make it impossible....

The rules are — what I always say but people forget — the pictures have to be super impossible. I'm only interested in doing the impossible image. That's really hard to explain. But one of the first things I saw in my mind, was the ground opening up. And I realized what that means, when the bottom falls out under your feet.

So far that sounds exactly right as just about every single scientist and critc has said that the general ideas behind these disaster movies are, literally, impossible. But come on — who doesn't want to see people running from frost?

Stick To What You Know: You Can Always Blow Up The White House Again

[If you are going to destroy something] It has to be very original, otherwise you don't do it. I remember at one point [during 2012 production] we were discussing what will happen with the White House [in 2012]. I said, "What should happen? I cannot destroy the White House again." And Harald [Kloser, screenwriter] said, "Well you have to, if you don't destroy it people will have the same question. Just come up with something new." ... I thought I could have this object crashing into the White House, because we knew that in one of the first waves we'd have to put objects in it so you could see how big it was and thought maybe tankers or war ships. Then we came up with image of [the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy crashing into the White House, which is like] JFK returns to the White House. I was reading about the Kennedy family a lot at the time and thought that was sort of ironic and interesting in a way.

You gotta respect a man who made a career of blowing up the White House, so much that if he doesn't do it we wonder why not? But honestly, we're running out of cities for this guy to destroy, and yet he still manages to crush them differently each time. One has to wonder if he'll be able to come up with more after this last disaster.

The More Characters The Better

Multi characters help you a lot because you can constantly keep the story moving. And people from all walks of life. Every audience member has different people they like in the movie and will follow them. These movies are so expensive that they have to work for pretty much everybody. For young people, for men and women. old people probably like Danny Glover, and Harry and Tony, the Jazz musicians. Kids get wrapped up in our two kids. Create characters so everyone in the audience has an identification figure.

I guess that means my character in 2012 is Woody Harrelson the conspiracy blogger, cause I like cartoons and pickles too. Look at me, I'm bonding with the story! Still I'd like to meet the people that relate to beautiful Vivca Fox, the heart-of-gold stripper who loves dolphins and has a Fighter Pilot for a boyfriend.

Superheroes Aren't Half As Cool As Earthquakes, Tornadoes And Waves

Who wants character-driven movies about confused anti-heroes in a near futuristic world fighting Oscar-winning villains? Not me. Give me Will Smith punching aliens and Bill Pullman's president speech any day.

Look at it like this. I'm a person who doesn't like superhero movies, just personally. I like some of them but I cannot really relate to a superhero. I have trouble with fantasy stories. And famous books — I write my own stuff, a famous book is really not an option for me. There's very little left in big movie genres. It's science fiction or it's disaster movies. And what is the most successful movie of all time? Titanic. And the best part of a disaster movie is: No sequel.

Cut Other Would-Be Disaster Porn Directors Off At The Knees

You have to be a tyrant about getting your end of the world movies made. This is why Emmerich is the King of the B grade blow em up movies, because he'll make it before you. Who wants to wait until 2012 to make 2012? Not this guy.

"First when we had the idea, I said, I'm not going to do it. I don't want to repeat myself. Then we heard inklings that other people were working on something like this, also with the title 2012. Then Harald [the screenwriter] said, "Someone else is going to do it. Don't you want to be the person to do it? Look at your movies: you are perfect for this. Make it your crowning achievement."

Be G-Rated Political *Winky Wink, Nudge Nudge*

If you've seen the five-minute clip from 2012, you know there is a Arnold-esque Governor in the film reassuring the people of California that everything is a-okay, after a mess of earthquakes rocked the town, to which John Cusack yells he's "just an actor, he's reading a script." Suddenly fake Arnold gets creamed with a few lights. Subtle, no? We asked the director if this was on purpose as in The Day After Tomorrow, when actor Kenneth Welsh was cast to be a Cheney look-alike. If you remember Welsh was a bit of a dick about the whole, "we're all gonna die," situation. Which Emmerich later confirmed was a dig at the Bush administration's environmental policies. Emmerich shrugged off our political questions:

"We kind of felt that not every politician should be on the ark. I don't know where these ideas come from. We have terrible fun with what we do."

Which I'm translating as: We lob softball politics at the audience, just so everyone feels good about themselves, for being in on the obvious political joke. I wonder what Emmerich would say his reasoning behind casting Glover as the president before we knew the results of this election. Or was it simply just another near-future "Neato, a black president!" moment?

For Every Wrinkled-Shirted Scientist, You Need At Least One Crazy Prophet

Dennis Quaid, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Jeffrey Goldblum may have messy hair, messy clothes, big ideas, and know all the facts. But they pale in comparison to their crazy counterparts: the homeless guy with the dog, spouting words of humanity, Woody Harrelson's crazy tree-hugger and the drunken pilot from Independence Day who knew there were aliens all along.

[Woody] came out of the fact that there are a lot of crazy people on the internet that believe a lot of crazy things about 2012, so we thought that we have to have a character like that. And then on the other hand we have to explain what the theories are like Earth Crust Displacement. How do you describe them in scientific terms. And we thought, we can have Woody tell the audience how this all works, with a little you tube.

But Make The Destruction Glamorously Terrible

Say what you will about the exceedingly cheesy work of Roland — you can't deny, when he slaughters millions of tiny CG specks that are supposed to be people, he does it with panache and style. It may be ridiculous, but it's beautiful. Which is why, no matter how cliche or repetitive these movies get, it will make millions opening week, because people want to see the great big wave number two come careening into New York City yet again, but on a big fat splodey screen. When it comes to disaster porn, we're all addicts.

In Men Who Stare At Goats, Ewan McGregor plays Bob Wilton a reporter who's trying to escape from his boring life, so when he gets wind of a secret military program from the 1980s to create "Jedi" soldiers, he follows the story. At first, you think that he's just a very off-beat embedded journalist, following the semi-retired Jedi Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) around, but it becomes clear that Wilton is getting more out of this than just a story: He's becoming Cassady's Padawan and learning to become a Jedi himself.

McGregor, of course, played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the three Star Wars prequels, and the film winks at this fact a few times, when Clooney says McGregor knows nothing about being a Jedi. But actually, in many ways, this is the Star Wars movie I wish McGregor had starred in before — it's about learning the ways of the Jedi, and seeing the contradictions inherent in the phrase "warrior-monk."

In Goats, which is based very loosely on the real-life story of the New Earth Army, we discover that the U.S. Army developed a secret program, following the humiliation of Vietnam, to fight a new way. And this involved developing psychic powers, but also letting in some of the counterculture's spirit of anarchy and playfulness. Drugs, long hair and crazy paintings. Unfortunately, one of the leading Jedi in this organization was secretly aligned with the Dark Side (this is actually explictly said at least once) and he corrupts the organization, tarnishing the other leading Jedis and turning one of them into his henchman of evil. So in the end, McGregor is the movie's Luke Skywalker, learning the Jedi legacy and ultimately helping to restore the light side.

Along the way, Clooney doesn't just teach McGregor how to burst clouds with his mind: he gives McGregor a grounding in the spiritual discipline behind the Jedi way, with a mixture of battiness and sageness that's actually kind of intoxicating.

All of this is played with tongue pretty firmly in cheek, but at the same time, it's made pretty explicit. And the movie is as charming as McGregor, Bridges and Clooney can make it. Bridges, especially, brightens up the screen every time he turns up as Bill Django, the founder of the Jedi organization.

There's a parable, here, of the ways in which America itself has turned away from opportunities to become more peace-loving, more creative, and less exploitative of our natural resources and of each other. And the failure of the "Jedi" program to meld the hippie "peace and love" ethos with the military's buzz-cut culture doesn't just expose the fact that you can't be a soldier and a monk (in our military, anyway.) The culture clash also aims to say something about America, and the ways in which we've betrayed the promise of the 1970s peace movement.

Here's a personal share: I have an alarmingly low tolerance for Baby Boomer nostalgia and, after several years in the Haight Ashbury, my hippie kitsch allergy is at a permanent level of anaphylactic shock. And yet, there is something beautiful and hilarious about the scenes where Bridges transforms his army unit into a group of shaggy-haired, dancing oddballs. And something heartbreaking about seeing the Dark Side destroying the Jedis. Mostly, this is because Jeff Bridges and George Clooney are so much fun to watch, you don't care.

And like I said, Star Wars sits at the center of the movie's themes. At one point, Clooney says that the Jedi program flourished in the 1980s because Ronald Reagan was such a big Star Wars fan. Reagan's Star Wars, of course, was a missile defense program that many scientists claimed was impractical, but Reagan never let go of the idea. Star Wars is so many different things to different people: a glorious war story, a window into one man's personal growth, a parable of controlling your hatred and choosing peace... part of why the original trilogy was so powerful was that it spoke to so many people in so many different ways.

And in a way, Men Who Stare At Goats is as much about the legacy of Star Wars as is it as about the legacy of woo-woo New Age hippie culture. Our culture was so heavily shaped by Star Wars, it opened up different ways of thinking about the way of the warrior, as well as offering some of the most exciting battle scenes ever committed to film. How you view Star Wars says a lot about your outlook on the universe in general.

Goats is often hilarious and sometimes chilling, but it's not a perfect movie. In particular, the pacing is a bit lead-footed at times, and the story loses some of its impact as a result. The movie's mix of absurdity and scary war scenes definitely won't work for everybody — I liked this film quite a bit, but Entertainment Weekly gave it an F. But all in all, I found it an entertaining, thought-provoking ride — of all the oddball films that have come out lately (including The Box and Fourth Kind) I'd say Goats is the most fun, and the most entertaining. Mostly, it's Jeff Bridges and George Clooney obviously having a blast playing another pair of larger-than-life characters, and that's a goat ride I'm always willing to take.