For the last year, Norman Osborn (a.k.a. Spider-Man's greatest archnemesis) has been the director of the intergovernmental military force H.A.M.M.E.R. Under his tenure, Norm's made bad behavior the norm - villains are posing as heroes, heroes are hunted as villains, dogs are breeding with cats, and so on.

Luckily for the forces of justice (and comic fans' hemorrhaging wallets), Norman's Dark Reign begins to wraps up this month with Siege: The Cabal, a prelude to the four-part Siege miniseries, which will detail Norman's inevitably ill-fated invasion of Thor's old stomping grounds, Asgard.

As a tribute to the man who made criminal insanity de rigueur for 2009, we've compiled the kookiest moments of the occasional Green Goblin's career. Thanks for memories, Norm.

(PS: As for Norman's man behind the curtain, I've got $25 riding on Shuma-Gorath and a Super Nintendo copy of Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage on Uncle Ben.)

Norman Pink-Slips The Swordsman

From: Secret Invasion: Dark Reign 1 (2008)

Andreas von Strucker never had a chance to become an A-list baddie. His dad was the most famous Nazi in the M.U. (Baron von Strucker), his superpower was way too incestuous for mainstream villany (skin-to-skin contact with his twin sister Andrea allowed him to fire energy bolts), and - when his sis kicked it - he traipsed about with a sword hilted with her tanned hide. Ick.

Given the Swordsman's lack of PR potential, it's unsurprising Norm fired Andreas from his gig as the Thunderbolts' in-house pompous bastard. Unfortunately for Andy, Norm's idea of a severance package was pretty literal.

Norman Fakes Aunt May's Death Just For Laughs

From: Spectacular Spider-Man 263 (1998)

In 1973, the Green Goblin throws Gwen Stacy off of the George Washington Bridge. It was poignant. In 1995, Aunt May dies of a heart attack (but only after revealing that she always knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man). This too was poignant.

And in 1998, Norman admits to kidnapping Aunt May, replacing her with a genetically altered elderly actress (?) and keeping the real May alive in a warehouse for absolutely no damn reason. This was why I stopped reading comic books in the late 90s.

Norman Recruits The Sentry with Hamburgers

From: Dark Avengers 3 (2009)

Norman's Dark Avengers sales pitch to the Sentry is awesome, particularly when he starts yammering out of the blue about Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Seriously, getting two mentally ill anti-heroes to bond over your burgers is product placement* In-N-Out can just dream about.

*To be fair, I tried Five Guys for the first time shortly after reading this. It was fucking fantastic. Yes, the Green Goblin sold me on a hamburger.

Norman Knocks Flash Thompson Off The Wagon

From: Peter Parker: Spider-Man 45 (2002)

In another story straight out of the "Overly Complex Green Goblin Scheme and Laughably Grim Take on a Classic Spider-Man Co-star" files, Norman hires a down-on-his-luck and recovering alcoholic Flash Thompson, gets him blotto, and puts him behind the wheel of an OsCorp truck on a collision course with Peter Parker's high school.

Luckily for Flash, the ensuing brain damage from the accident was retconned away by Peter Parker's deal with Mephisto in the One More Day storyline. Unluckily for Flash, he had instead lost his legs in Iraq. By the time Brander Newer Day rolls around, Flash will be caught betwixt the Scylla and Charybids of shingles and premature ejaculation.

Norman Mocks Spider-Man's Lack of Fluid

While we're on the topic of One More Day, we're pretty sure this 1982 exchange was retconned out of existence as well. Pity. If all of Spidey's rogues' gallery began making fun of his shortcomings in the fluid department, it could really mess him up on a psychosexual level.

Norman Watches the Submariner Take a Shower

From: Dark X-Men: The Beginning 1 (2009)

When Namor joined the Dark X-Men, one of the men seemingly tacked on a rider requiring the director of H.A.M.M.E.R. to watch the Prince of Atlantis' daily ablutions. Is it a mind game on Namor's part to give Osborn an inferiority complex? Is Norman just being Norman? We honestly cannot say.

Norman Knocks Up His Son's Girlfriend

From: The Amazing Spider-Man 598 (2009)

If Namor was indeed attempting to show up Norman's manhood, he'll have to try a little harder. For a white guy with cornrows, Norm's had disturbingly good luck with the fairer sex, with a big emphasis on "disturbingly" here.

In 2009, Norm impregnated his son Harry's girlfriend, Lily. Sure, she was secretly the supervillain she-goblin Menace (and the only woman strong enough to handle Norman's mutated goblin sperm), but really? Really? At least this stupid, creepy baby mama subplot wasn't born out of an even stupider, creepier baby mama subplot…or was it?

Norman Knocks Up Spider-Man's Girlfriend

From: The Amazing Spider-Man 512 (2004)

Hoo boy. Yes, that is Norman Osborn dirty dancing with Gwen Stacy. Yes, that is Norman's O-face. Yes, Norman is too evil for rubbers.

For those of you who don't remember this episode, allow us to recap in the simplest terms possible:

1. Norman has an affair with Gwen Stacy.
2. She secretly gives birth to twins. Norman's Goblin spunk alters the children's DNA and rapidly ages them to adulthood.
3. Norman has a hissy fit and chucks Gwen off a bridge.
4. The twins grow up to be super-assassins or some similar dross.

The most depressing part of this incident wasn't its necrophiliac treatment of the Silver Age of Comics. No, it's that One More Day didn't exile any of this dolorous twaddle into retcon oblivion.

Norman is Willem Dafoe

From: Spider-Man (2002)

Say what you will about his Power Rangers-esque bodysuit – when Willem Dafoe was out of his chartreuse kabuki mask, he brought a mantis-like sensuality to the Green Goblin that few other actors could muster. I almost wish Sam Raimi had simply painted Dafoe green, at the risk of audiences mistaking Norman for a deranged Green Bay Packers fan.

Norman Goes Spider Jerusalem on The Thunderbolts

From: Thunderbolts 120 (2008)

Thunderbolts 120 is perhaps the best portrayal of Norman Osborn. Ever. The issue begins with a five-page monologue of unmistakable Warren Ellis patois and ends with Norman vowing to kill his entire security staff just cuz'. Along the way, we are treated to infinitely quotable epigrams on…

His Green Goblin outfit: "I'm so glad I never washed this particular costume. Smells like death, blondes, and victory."

Venom and Swordsman: "I was wondering if you could direct me to the arm-eating retard and the sword-waving aristo. I have to punish them you see."

Himself: "I'm fricking martyr to my own innate heroism, is what I am. Norman Osborn, America's last hero. That's what I am."

I could write a whole dissertation on this one issue, but let's just say that the brilliance of Norman's portrayal here is that he epitomizes the hallmark difference between heroes and villains – restraint. Let the good guys hamstring their powers with laws and moral pantywaistry. Norman Osborn's screaming "I AM GOD!", watching his peons brown their trousers, and laughing his ass off about it. Who's to say he's the crazy one?

Variety announced that Helen Mirren has joined the cast of the live adaptation movie of the comic Red.

The Time Traveler's Wife director Robert Schwentke is adapting Warren Ellis' three-issue comic series. The story follows a retied old black ops CIA agent who is forced back into the wild world of espionage, when he finds out he's marked for death. So he's got to rally his old retired CIA buddies to get behind the conspiracy theory surrounding the plot to kill him. With an "old people are so nutty and can murder you with their bare hands" twist. So what does Warren think of the new casting?

Warren Ellis replied via Twitter:

Current casting of the film adaptation of my graphic novel RED: Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren. SO WEIRD.

But who will she be playing? Summit hopes Red will be in theaters Nov. 19, 2010.

Update: The Hollywood Reporter just added that John C. Reilly and Mary Louise Parker will also be joining the cast. Reilly will play a paranoid retired CIA agent convinced that everyone is out to kill him, and Parker will play Bruce Willis' love interest, a federal pension worker who gets caught up in his struggle to survive. [via /Film]

Summer, which was published from 2007 through 2008 by indie publisher Avatar Press, was Transmetropolitan and Planetary writer Ellis' attempt to break new ground for the superhero genre, stripping it of continuity and familiar characters and trying to rebuild it for a new audience. As he said in a 2007 interview:

There are still questions to be asked of the superhero genre, but, after all these years, most of the ones left are pretty esoteric and involved. I was looking for the simple question, the one that gets to the heart of the central notion of people disguising themselves and taking up arms to fight for justice with total commitment. And the one I found had political expression but was essentially ethical and moral. Where do you draw the line? Especially if you're a guy with the destructive potential of a fleet of Apache helicopters. If you're that guy, you're not in it to govern. You don't see that as your job, and, in fact, that would prevent you from doing your job. You operate outside society to keep it honest. So where do you draw the line? And where's the line before which you embody the outrage of the people and beyond which you become the fears of the people?

Here's a clue to where the answer to that last part may lie: The story begins with one of seven superheroes killing the President of the United States.

The movie adaptation will be the first project from the brand new Vigilante Enterprises. No studio, director or writers have been announced for the project yet.

Vigilante launching with 'Black Summer' [Variety]

The DVD version of the movie - serialized online before being shown on Adult Swim earlier this year - includes new unseen footage, as well as interviews with the people responsible and storyboards like these:

GI Joe: Resolute will be released on November 3rd.

So why are these cities so overwhelmingly large? And where do they come from? Here's a list, by region:

North America:

The city of North Am (in Magnus Robot Fighter) does just what it sounds like — it covers almost the entirety of North America, giving you lots and lots of space in which to (what else?) fight robots.

The Maze is a huge network of underground parking garages that stretches all the way from New York to Los Angeles, in the movie Circuitry Man.

Lots and lots of SF stories predict a huge swathe of city stretching along the East Coast of the United States. One of the most famous is Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, which eventually stretches all the way down to Florida.

In Neuromancer and other books by William Gibson, a mega-city stretching from Boston to Atlanta is known as the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA) or The Sprawl.

In He, She And It by Marge Piercy, the urban megalopolis that stretches from the former Boston to the former Atlanta is called The Glop.

And similarly, in the novel The Rise Of The Conglomerates by Thomas Nevins, a huge sprawling "Conglomerate City" occupies most of the East Coast of the United States.

There's also BosWash, the city that stretches from Manchester, NH to Virginia Beach, Virginia. It was first predicted in the 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by Jean Gottman.

The City in Transmetropolitan is commonly believed to be a megacity including New York and stretching as far West as the Great Lakes, which are referred to as its Western lakes.

The Greater Chicago Industrial Zone: In Halo, the former city of Chicago now covers the former states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana. And Chicago is no longer really part of the United States — the people in this city-state consider thesmelves citizens of the United Nations.

In real life, some urban planners talk about an area called ChiPitts, which comprises Chicago and Pittsburgh, and everything in between.

Texarkana in A Canticle For Leibowitz, appears to cover a huge chunk of the former Texas and Arkansas, and becomes the capitol of an empire that rules the Western Hemisphere — and eventually wipes out its main rival, New Rome. (Map from Wikipedia page.)

Texas City, in the Judge Dredd comic, covers a huge area of the former Southwest — including Texas, of course.

Bay City is a massive conurbation covering San Francisco as well as its outlying areas, in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon.

San Angeles appears in many different works of fiction, and it usually encompasses Los Angeles, San Diego and sometimes Santa Barbara. It's the setting for Demolition Man.

Mega-City Two also accounts for five thousand miles of California coastline — or it did, until it was nuked — in the Judge Dredd comic.

South America:

Sao Paulo/Rio: In Ben Bova's Mars, the rural poor stream into the cities of Sao Paolo and Rio De Janeiro in such huge numbers, the two cities grow into "a single urban megacity more than three hundred kilometers wide, that stretched from the beaches to the inland hills, sparkling high-rise towers for the rich, sprawling filthy slums for the poor, and smoggy lung-corroding pollution for all."

Ciudad Baranquilla, aka Banana City, is the mega city that covers most of Central America in the Judge Dredd comics.

Europe:

Greater London — in Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, London has grown outwards massively, swallowing up tons of villages and formerly independent towns. Clarke and Baxter describe London as spreading out, "kilometer upon kilometer of houses and factories... the scattered, helpless city that lay helpless below" a passing airplane.

Edinburgh/Glasgow — it's not strictly speaking science fiction, but there's a lot of talk about these two Scottish cities combining into one megalopolis in the coming century. The two cities could soon be linked by a high-speed maglev train. But it doesn't appear that any science fiction authors have written about EdinGow yet.

Metropia, in the animated film of the same name, is a massive network of subway systems and "undergrounds" linking all the cities in continental Europe. The world is running out of oil, so the leaders come up with the plan to link all of the subway systems into one huge network — which appears to be haunted.

City Europe, in the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove, covers an enormous area of continental Europe, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The city is made up of a series of "stacks" with the richest people living on the top levels and the poorest down in the wastelands below.

The south of England is occupied by Brit-Cit in Judge Dredd. Plus East Meg One is another mega-city in the Judge Dredd universe, which covers a big chunk of the former Soviet Union, including Moscow.

And of course, there's East-Meg One, the Soviet mega-city in Judge Dredd, which sprawls around the remains of Moscow — until it gets destroyed in a war with Mega-City One.

Africa:

Pan-Africa is a continent-wide quasi-state comprising several mega-cities in the Judge Dredd universe: they include Umar (the former Libya), Simba City (Cameroon), Luxor (Egypt), New Jerusalem (the northeast of Ethiopia), and Casablanca.

Gauteng is another one that doesn't appear to have popped up in science fiction very much, but it's talked about a lot in real life. In a nutshell, Johannesburg (a city already growing way past its capacity) joins up with Pretoria/Tshwane and a number of other municipalities, to form a single megacity. There are already plans to join them via a high-speed "Gautrain."

Asia:

Mega-Tokyo in Bubblegum Crisis. An earthquake splits Tokyo in two, and as the city rebuilds, it gets even larger and much more sprawling, coming to be known as Mega Tokyo. Here's a map of Mega Tokyo, from B-Club Special (via Igarashi) Likewise, Akira takes place in Neo Tokyo, a sprawling metropolis of steel and neon. And the anime Cyber-City Oedo 808 takes place in a fictional future "Edo," or Tokyo, which is apparently much larger than the existing city.

And real-life urban planners talk about the Taiheiyo Belt, which will cover the Pacific coast of Japan including Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.

A single continuous robotic structure known as The Host covers almost all the islands of Japan, and 50 million people live inside it, in Magnus Robot Fighter and Rai.

And of course, Judge Dredd does not leave Asia untouched — Hondo City covers most of Japan, from Hokkaido all the way down to Wakayama.

Australia:

Greater Sydney is predicted to encompass a region spanning from Melbourne, all the way up to Queensland along the coast. But as with Edinburgh/Glasgow and Gauteng, it doesn't appear that anybody's written science fiction about this megalopolis yet.

The South Pole:

A continent-wide city called Antarcto covers the whole of the Antarctic, in Magnus, Robot Fighter. Because robot-fighting is best served... cold.

And of course, the city of Holy Terra, or just Terra, occupies almost the entire planet's surface in Warhammer 40,000.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Map layout by Stephanie Fox.

Ultimate Comics: Armor Wars - a four issue Iron Man series written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Steve Kurth - will see Tony Stark face up to a mysterious villain (Our bet? A new version of Justin Hammer, the villain behind the original "Armor Wars" storyline and Sam Rockwell's character in the Iron Man 2 movie) who's using the Iron Man technology to come up with their own take on robot-suited warfare.

Ultimate Comics: Armor Wars launches next month.

We told you about Marvel Anime, Marvel's new initiative that sees them pairing Ellis with Japanese animation studio Madhouse to produce four new series for Japanese television, last week, but Marvel unveiled the trailers for the first two series at San Diego Comic-Con yesterday, and we have to admit that we're pretty excited to see the finished product already. Why isn't it Spring 2010 (the expected premiere date of the two shows) already?

Announced prior to its launch at next week's San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Anime will see Marvel team with legendary Japanese animation studio Madhouse (Vampire Hunter D, Tokyo Godfathers, Death Note and many, many more) for four new television series based on well-known Marvel characters. The first two to be announced, Iron Man and Wolverine, are expected to start airing in Japan next year and are based on new takes by British writer Warren Ellis, who apparently enjoys re-imagining franchises for animation, having just performed similar duties on Hasbro's GI Joe: Resolute.

This won't be the first time Madhouse have worked on American properties; they contributed to DC's Batman: Gotham Knight movie and The Animatrix, and have even worked with Marvel before on the Hulk Vs. series.

More details on Marvel Anime will be revealed at Marvel's animation panel next Friday at San Diego Comic-Con.

Warren Ellis searched through the new edition of Gardner Dozois' latest Year's Best Science Fiction volume, and found the latest ill tidings for the big science fiction print mags. Analog Science Fiction And Fact lost 1,400 readers, or about 5.1 percent, falling to just under 26,000 copies of each issue in circulation. Asimov's Science Fiction and The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction both saw drops of 2.7 percent each, to around 17,000 copies and 16,044 copies respectively.

These are actually fairly gentle declines, compared to previous years. According to Ellis, Asimov's lost 5.2 percent of its circulation in 2007, 13.6 percent in 2006 and 23 percent in 2005. The last time we reported on circulation numbers, F&SF had seen an 11.2 percent drop, to around 16,489. (That was only six months ago though.)

As we pointed out last time, back in 2004, F&SF had a paid circulation of around 20,000 copies, while Asimov's was at around 30,000 copies and Analog was at around 40,000 copies.

So it's not just an ongoing attrition — there was a fairly steep dive, which has now leveled off somewhat. Does this mean we've hit a kind of floor, for now anyway? Are there roughly 16,000 die-hard science fiction fans who will always buy F&SF and Asimov's, no matter what? And another 10,000 who'll also pick up Analog? Or is this just a brief plateau before the next dive?

I'm actually fairly pessimistic: moves like F&SF going bimonthly are bound to decrease the visibility of these magazines on the newsstand, and a lot of the most exciting short fiction in print seems to be cropping up in themed anthologies lately. The newsstand digest format, itself, feels a bit like a relic, and magazine distribution is only going to get more and more brutal, as a business. I'm not sure what a magazine would have to do to get 40,000 copies in circulation, these days, but I suspect it would involve new distribution channels, like comic-book stores and coffee shops. [Warren Ellis]

Dipping our collective toes into the cross-media area of the pool for awhile, Doctor Who: Autopia is a new one-off story to keep you in the Who mood while you're waiting for The Waters of Mars. Also, Joss Whedon's Runaways run gets a cheap ($9.99 for six issues!) collection as Runaways: Dead End Kids Digest.

If you're looking for a new take on old science fiction tropes, the second series of Warren Ellis' Anna Mercury launches with a different look at the multiverse. And Marc Guggenheim's Resurrection also launches a second series, letting you return to an Earth post-alien invasion, where no-one is quite sure what kind of world they're living in any more.

For those needing their superhero fix, DC's Red Robin takes Tim Drake - the former Robin - off around the world as he tries to prove that Bruce Wayne isn't as dead as many people think he is. (Go, Tim! But you may need a time machine before you're finished!) And you can find out Bruce's true fate in the hardcover collection of Final Crisis (and pick up some other stories from the same era in the Final Crisis Companion coming out the same day).

Marvel, meanwhile, are indulging a Chris Claremont jones, with the X-Men: The End Trilogy collection of Claremont's 18-issue finale to the franchise. (Be warned: He spun another series out of it, so it's not a final finale.) There's also the first issue of X-Men Forever, a new series that lets Claremont pretend that he never stopped writing the characters in 1991, by ignoring every story that came afterwards. If you'd like something less wordy and more bloody, Christos Gage's Absolution offers up another take on the "When a superhero crosses the moral line and decides that doing so was kind of fun" story.

But let's face it; everything else this week may pale beside the release of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan #1, a movie adaptation 27 years in the making (Yes, the movie was that long ago); IDW, realizing that STII was the one movie that had never been made into a comic, have finally fulfilled someone's dreams and offered a chance to see Spock die again.

But if you'd rather watch something come back to life, Dynamite's Buck Rogers #1 brings back the classic pulp hero for an all-new audience, offering space thrills and even some spills along the way. But sadly, no Twiki.

All of these books - and many more, as evidenced in this week's shipping list - can be found at your local comic store, which can be found using the Comic Shop Locator. Just do us a favor and spend a quiet moment when ringing up your week's purchases for the loss of Buck's annoying metallic friend. Bidi bidi bye, old buddy.

GI Joe: Resolute (written by acclaimed comic book writer Warren Ellis) is being positioned as a more "sophisticated" take on the characters than the old animated series, in preparation for this summer's big-budget movie; the online premiere of the show leads up to its broadcast premiere on Cartoon Network next week, which will show all of the webisodes as well as debut the final 10 minutes of the storyline. We have to admit, we're excited, even if we kind of miss those old PSAs.

GI Joe: Resolute [Adult Swim]

Marvel are apparently trying to flood the shelves tomorrow, but at least they're doing it with good books from good writers. Fred Van Lente is behind the new Savage She-Hulk and Marvel Zombies 4 series. Jeff Parker is writing the reborn Exiles. Andy DIggle is scripting Dark Reign: Hawkeye, and the wonderful Jason Aaron gets a brand new series, Wolverine: Weapon X in advance of next month's movie.

As if that wasn't enough, there's also a new hardcover collection of the last Dark Tower series, Treachery (not to mention Dark Tower: The Guide To Gilead, a fact-file-ish tie-in) and the first issue of time-travel series Timestorm: 2009-2099.

(Of course, time-travel fans may just be picking up the collection of Doctor Who: The Forgotten, which also comes out tomorrow).

While DC's much quieter new release schedule offers mostly continuations of ongoing events and series - I'd definitely point you in the direction of the second issue of Superman: World of New Krypton, just to see if it measures up to the impressive first - that's not to say that they have no new books of note this week. In fact, the Showcase Presents: Doom Patrol Vol. 1 collection may just be the best thing out this week, a collection of the 1960s team of misfit heroes (Radioactive test pilots! Racing car drivers without a body!) that offered an off-kilter alternative to the then-cookie cutter cleanshaven heroes they were surrounded with. Definitely recommended.

Also recommended is Ignition City, the new series from Warren Ellis that we wrote about back in November that mixes steampunk, Deadwood and the fate of all old pulp heroes when they're not young and dashing anymore. Ask for it by name when visiting your local funny book emporium.

That'll be the one you can find here, in case you're wondering - and make sure to check out the complete list of books reaching stores this week before doing so. If they ask, tell 'em that the ghost of Flash Gordon sent you.

Ellis first mentioned the idea for the series way back in 2006:

So I was sitting in front of the computer sometime in September 2005 watching an episode of DEADWOOD and thinking about how Alan Moore lucked into all those lovely postmodern ideas like assembling disparate adventurers of the 19th Century into the 20th Century model of a superhero team and remembering how much fun it was to write MINISTRY OF SPACE when my computer told me it’d finally downloaded a piece of public domain film I’d started torrenting four hours earlier. In a rare moment of nostalgia, I’d decided to download an episode of one of the old FLASH GORDON serials. Buster Crabbe running around, with his peroxide hair that he was so embarrassed about that he used to keep his hat on all the time while in public, unconscionable rudeness in 1930 America. Total nostalgia trip for me, because all of those things — the FLASH GORDON serials, the old BUCK ROGERS serial, KING OF THE ROCKETMEN and all that — were shown on British tv when I was a kid. “Steam-powered STAR WARS,” my dad used to call them.

And I’m watching DEADWOOD, the American cable tv series that eviscerates the Western genre, mixing history with fiction in its imagining of the last days of the Wild West. And it suddenly occurs to me. Where did the space heroes go when they weren’t in space anymore? I found myself looking at the clapboard and pine of the Deadwood camp and seeing it made out of bits of abandoned 1930s sci-fi rocketship, and a fifty-year-old Flash Gordon calling people “cocksucker.”

So I noted it down and put it in the Loose Ideas folder on my computer desktop. I told myself that I didn’t particularly want to do another “retro” book. God knows there were and are enough shallow retakes of old genres and materials around, ironic or straight.

But the fucking thing nagged at me.

Amongst the preview art that Ellis is offering, there's also a page of script from the first issue, where we get to meet one of the main characters of the story, Lightning Bowman:

PAGE FOURTEEN
Pic 1
CUT TO: in a small room with one small porthole in its curving steel wall, we discover LIGHTNING BOWMAN sitting on a chamberpot, wearing only a long-sleeved velour t-shirt type thing with a lightning bolt embroidered on the front, totally naked from the waist down. Straining. Lightning Bowman used to be an athlete, tall, bronzed, blond. His hair is still blond, but, when we see him move, he's stooped, and he's not lean any more, just thin. He doesn't fit his own skin. He's coming up hard on fifty, and not looking good on it.

LIGHTNING is a major character. I think we can introduce him with a page-wide shot, squatting on his chamberpot. The floor, by the way, will either be steel or wood, and have a DIY, home-made kind of finish. We'll see why later.

BOWMAN
Hnng.

Pic 2
Spittle flies from his lips as the tension lets go.

BOWMAN
Pfffah.

Pic 3
He stands with difficulty, pulling his shirt down reflexively over his cock. Because we don't need to see that, do we? No.

BOWMAN
Goddamnit.

Lightning isn't the story's protagonist, however; that duty falls to Mary Raven, apparently. The series, illustrated by Ellis' Aetheric Mechanics partner Gianluca Pagliarani, will launch with a five-issue opening story, according to the writer. No announcement has been made about a release date yet.

IGNITION CITY: Portents And Strange Rumbly Noises [Whitechapel]

At the Soul Men premiere we got Friendly chatting about the next installment of Big Momma's House and the new comedy Don't Send Help about a guy who ends up on on a desert island with six of the most beautiful women in the world, and he doesn't want to be rescued. But our ears perked up when he started talking comics with us.

Q: The big trend in Hollywood right now is science fiction. All of the blockbusters are derived from scifi or comic books, what's your take on that? I know you work with a lot of comedy, will we be seeing any scifi comedy from you?

Friendly: Well, I think you're talking about movies like Transformers and things like that. I think that the audience that goes to movies, they don't just read traditional books and magazines. They read graphic novels and comic books, and they're on the internet. I've got a 13-year-old son who's on Xbox Live. He's playing games with people in Russia, he doesn't even know who he's playing. What you have to do is broaden your horizons. I've started reading graphic novels I never would have started reading before.

Q: Oh yeah what have you been reading?

I read one that I'm interested in pursuing. I don't want to say the name.

Q: Aw come on tell us?

I'll tell you just for fun it's called Desolation Jones. It's a really good comic book. I would love to work on a graphic novel and turn it into a movie, because I've never done that and it's a challenge. And I think what is important is people like me have to stay current with how people are being entertained. If you just rely on books and screenplays, you'll be left in the dust. It's a cool book. It's just something I kind of want to go after.

In order for this to happen I'm assuming that Warren Ellis would have to be a part of it, as I believe he still owns the rights to this slightly abandoned book. Last we heard Desolation Jones was in a publishing limbo. I'd like to see this book get the conclusion it deserves, maybe in a movie?

Desolation Jones is about a former agent of MI6 who undergoes the Desolation Treatment, which entails a year without sleep. He survives and becomes an all white and gray-colored man who kills without remorse. After the project ends, he lives in LA as a private eye who hallucinates all sorts of wacky stuff and works for the people of LA, which turns out to be chock full of imprisoned ex-agents.

Update: We just got comment from the Warren Ellis about the possibility of the Desolation Jones movie. He simply replied:

"All I can tell you is that we've never heard from David Friendly."

Fair enough, but what is this "All I can tell you," is there something to tell? Let's put these two in a room together stat, it could be a fun live action adaptation.

ReGenesis takes the disease of the week approach shared by a show like House, M.D. (which premiered at roughly the same time as ReGenesis, interestingly enough) and marries it to the split-screen, big-stakes, world-in-jeopardy sweep of 24. Each episode, the Toronto-based scientists of fictional organization NoRBAC (The North American Biotechnology Advisory Commission), led by brilliant grouch David Sandström (Peter Outerbridge), find themselves up against some new formidable threat, such as an unnatural combination of Ebola and Camel Pox, and use a blend of ingenuity and scientific research to solve the problem. (One of my favorite things about ReGenesis is whenever anyone comes out to a seemingly-impossible result with their testing, they're told they've made a mistake and to re-do their work again and again—which is the reaction you'd expect from real scientists when faced with such a scenario.)

The science consultant for ReGenesis is Aled Edwards, who oversees the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) from Toronto, Canada and is a Professor and Banbury Chair of Medical Research in the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research at the University of Toronto, which may be why the science feels like science, and why the tech talk goes the extra mile to be clear even when dealing with complex topics:

Another tremendous appealing part of the first season of ReGenesis is Ellen Page as David's daughter, Lilith, who spends most of her time stuck in a very emo subplot about an ailing son who believes himself to be a clone of his deceased older brother. It's not just that Page has the looks to make a geek's heart skip a beat—short hair, flawless skin, a forehead wide enough to do double duty as a battering ram—it's that she imbues her character's shrugging inarticulacy with James Dean-like layers of sensitivity.

Additionally, Xenophile Media won an International Emmy for Best Interactive Program for the ARG it produced to tie into Season Two, as well as awards for Season One. I'm never sure how long the shelf-life on a good alternate reality game actually is, but you can see for yourself at the site for NoBAC. Even cooler is the page set up by the Ontario Genomics Institute that breaks down the science of ReGenesis episode by episode, concept by concept.

Finally, we admit that Warren Ellis, in the same post from which we pulled his above quote, notes that "Season 2 [of ReGenesis] wasn’t nearly as good as 1." (Hulu only put up Season 2 last week, so we'll take his word for it.) But Ellis also ended up watching—and commenting—on all four of ReGenesis' seasons, which shows how absorbing this bio-mystery TV series can be. We'll take it over David Caruso and his sunglasses of justice any day.

[ReGenesis on Hulu]

After summarizing what he perceives as the head-in-the-sand attitude of print magazine editors ("[N]aturally enough, the magazines’ various teams appear not to consider anything to be wrong [despite the declining readership]. They’ll provide what their remaining audience would seem to want, until they all finally die of old age, and then they’ll turn out the lights. And that’ll be it for the short-fiction sf print magazine as we know it," he writes), Ellis starts looking at the reasons why online magazines often get ignored by followers of SF fiction:

One of the reasons... is that we associate print magazines with an intelligent curation process overseen by functional salaried adults. That’s why so many people still look askance at the online scene as "not proper magazines." The people who believe that got their wish last month, when one of the editors of HELIX SF had his covers pulled as a bigot with clear psychological issues by a disgruntled writer. It gives credence to the bias, unspoken or otherwise, that a print magazine is a job of work and an online magazine can be thrown up by any drooling lunatic with access to the net and a credit card. A fanzine by any other name.

Regular readers will know that I like sending traffic to the likes of CLARKESWORLD and FARRAGO’S WAINSCOT etc from time to time. Aside from (patchy, beautiful) McSWEENEY’S, these are the places I look to for short fiction now. No real fireworks yet, no real movement, none of them seem to be really cresting the other in terms of profile, but the best work there has been head and shoulders over pretty much anything I read from ASIMOV’S, F&SF or INTERZONE (with one exception in the latter case) over the last several months... It’s time now, I think, to turn attention to the online sf magazines. I personally live in hope that, one day, some of them move from net to print, and create a new generation of paper magazines. But, regardless, it’s time to focus on them — on what they do, how they generate revenue, and what their own future is.

But will that future include spam-esque pornbabble, that's what we want to know.

SF MAGAZINES: Yes, I’m Here To Ruin Everybody’s Day Again [Warren Ellis]