Writer/director Shane Acker made the post-apocalyptic ragdoll odyssey 9 as a short film while he was a student at UCLA, adn he won a student academy award for it, says Ksander. That plaudit brought the film to the attention of Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov, who agreed to help produce it as a full-length feature film. Unlike the voiceless short film, the 90-minute feature stars voice actors - including the main character 9, voiced by Wood.

(I apologize that I'm getting this up so late - I saw the 9 panel at Wondercon, but forgot to write up my notes until just now.)

Ksander and Wood showed the trailer, plus a really cool scene from the film where 9 has met the other mechanical rag dolls, numbered 1 through 8. He's getting them to question their beliefs about the post-apocalyptic world, but he's also made some mistakes, including attracting cyborg winged beast, which comes and attacks them.

The winged beast has four bright lights for eyes, and #1 (who wears a bishop's hat) cowers. Everyone runs from the winged beast and swings down ropes, winding up in a bucket. The winged beast cuts the rope holding the bucket, and they all fall through some stained glass. Only 9 is left facing the winged beast on the roof of the cathedral. He tells the others to keep going, and he'll find his own way down. But the other dolls help 9 to stop the winged beast, one of them throwing his knife at just the right moment to stop the winged beast's propeller. 9 shines the sun in the winged beast's eyes, and then they try to cut the tether holding the winged beast. Someone else attacks the winged beast with a spear, to no avail. Finally, they manage to knock the winged beast into a giant fan, and it explodes.

They explained a bit more of the backstory: 1, the rag doll in the bishop's hat, has put himself in charge of the other rag dolls, and their means of defending themselves against the machines. And 9 comes along without any knowledge of their world, or the machines, and so he asks lots of questions. The other rag dolls have long since stopped asking questions.

Wood said he got involved with the project after he saw the stills and "loved the look" of the short film and the fact that it was Acker's senior thesis at UCLA. And he said the film is "a very difficult thing to describe. [It's] these mechanized ragdolls living in a post-apocalyptic world, but that doesn't quite tell it."

Ksander said the "dark" look of the film really attracted people. "People were coming from other big studios to work on our film, and people were getting excited." And Danny "Oingo Boingo" Elfman is scoring the film with Acker right now. He added, "he feature film feels like the same world as the short."

In the end, said Ksander, the film is about "these little rag dolls with nothing going for them, each sort of first find their own identity, and then build a little community that lasts in this terrible dark world."

So there you have it — if you go to UC Berkeley, you won't have your girlfriend lit on fire on the ceiling, or get accused of cheating to disguise the fact that your brain is uniquely suited to being a human computer. They should totally put that on the recruitment brochures.

I watched a few episodes of League at Wondercon and... it was fun. Not Earth-shattering, or super clever, or outrageous. But good fun. In a nutshell, the League Of Super Evil follows a group of supervillain kids living in a house together. There's Voltar, their evil leader; Red Menace, who's green instead of red and is the group's muscle; Doktor Frogg, who's the group's mad scientist; and Doomageddon, the dog.

The show avoids a lot of the cliches you'd expect from a set-up like that. For one thing, the L.O.S.E. spends most of its time fighting other supervillains, not superheroes. (Although there's a pretty hilarious send-up of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in one episode.) For another, the plots mostly don't revolve around the supervillains trying to take over the world. More often, Voltar wants to impress the other kids in the neighborhood, or win a bet or something.

In one episode, Voltar brags to the neighbor kids that he gets a zillion TV channels... so he sends Doktor Frogg up into space to rig a special satellite to get a zillion channels for their TV set. And in another episode, the tiny Voltar steals another supervillain's giant suit of armor so he can beat another kid at a basketball slam-dunk contest.... but that attracts the attention of the afore-mentioned Power Rangers clones. In a third episode — and by far, the funniest I saw — Doktor Frogg builds a machine that will plug up all the toilets in the city, unless the city agrees to his demands... but Doktor Frogg has no clue what those demands are.

Oh yeah... Did I mention there are a lot of poop and fart jokes? Those pretty much form the underpinnings of this series, which is not at all a bad thing. At the Wondercon screening, at least one audience member mentioned it was reminiscent of Ren And Stimpy in terms of its aesthetic, but it's a lot gentler and sillier. The characters are basically losers, who stumble around in their giant suits of armor or go to ridiculous lengths to prove they're badass. According to Wikipedia, some other storylines include "selling watered down lemonade" and trying to get a table at the most elite supervillain restaurant in town.

It's cute and fun, and will probably spawn a cult following. The first episode is tonight at 9 on the Cartoon Network.

First of all, here's the trailer for the last six episodes of the season that they showed at Wondercon, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly:

Summer Glau's Terminator, Cameron, has been struggling with a lot of stuff lately. She's got a damaged chip in her head. She's got some mysterious agenda we don't fully understand. And she feels threatened by John Connor's new girlfriend, Riley. I asked Glau how she conveys all the stuff that's going on with Cameron.

Glau said the damage to Cameron's chip "threw off her game," and she's been having more insecurity about her ability to accomplish her mission. Plus, she's feeling uncertain because of the new girl in John's life, Riley. All of Cameron's issues are going to come to a head in the last half-dozen episodes, culminating in a huge clash/resolution/change in the final episode.

"Cameron thought she understood herself, and she thought she had an agenda that hasn't been revealed, and when she was damaged, things were going in on her in mind," said Glau. She's also been learning a lot from the people around her. "She's having to question herself," Glau added. "She has weaknesses now." It's been complicated to incorporate all this stuff into Glau's "strategy of playing Cameron."

"I loved the addition of the Riley character," adds Glau. "It gave me an opportunity to ask questions about Cameron's position being threatened."

We also got to talk to Shirley Manson, who said she didn't realize how big her part was when she first came on the show. She thought she might just have a brief appearance and one or two fight scenes. And when she asked Friedman for more details about her character, he said, "I don't know," and admitted they were still figuring out Weaver's whole story. The character of Terminator-turned-businesswoman Catherine Weaver didn't really click, for Manson, until she had scenes with Weaver's daughter, Savannah. After that, she totally understood who this character was, and how she was trying to do a better job of impersonating a human.

During the Wondercon panel, Manson added that she likes playing a bad mom: "Just watching what's happening with "octomom" is an example of how a society views a bad mother, and I relish the concept of playing the machine terminator mum opposite savannah," said Manson. "It's that "hiss factor," when you walk on stage, I welcome that. I love playing a villainess. Having a child there sets it up for great trial and public scorn."

"There was always a certain archness to the Terminators," Manson told us in the roundtables. "You never looked at Robert Patrick and thought he was acting like a normal human."

Manson says Richard T. Jones, who plays former FBI agent James Ellison, has been amazingly generous, taking her aside and basically giving her acting classes on set. They have terrific chemistry together, and "he's a yummy man," says Manson. "There's a joke going around the set that we're going to do our own spin-off series called Weaver And The Man," where Catherine Weaver starts a detective agency with Ellison. (I would actually watch that show.)

"I'm 42. I've been in bands since I was 15," says Manson. "There's a point where you're stepping in front of 100,000 people, and your blood pressure doesn't change. I wanted to do something that scared me." Otherwise, "you just get too comfortable, and everything becomes rote." Playing Catherine Weaver, and having such a huge learning curve as an actor, has given her a huge adrenaline rush. "It gets you back to who you were, before you started to put on the armor... making yourself vulnerable and opening yourself up to new experiences. [It's] the feeling you get, when you learn to ride the bicycle, and you're like, 'Oooh.'"

During the Wondercon Q&A, someone asked who would win in a fight between Cameron and Weaver. "As much love as I have for Summer, I think Shirley would kick her ass," said producer Josh Friedman. And the actresses joked that they have an upcoming scene where they mud-wrestle in bikinis.

Glau is guest-starring in an upcoming Big Bang Theory, playing herself, and she said it was really hard to switch to out-and-out comedy after having only done drama series in the past. The producer of BBT is a friend of Friedman's, and asked him about bringing Glau on the show. "What I love about Big Bang Theory is, those people really know their references. It's smart. It's not obvious" in referencing science fiction and other geek touchstones, said Glau.

Both authors were clearly fans of one another's work; the format was something akin to a very digressive chat show with Matt Fraction hosting, feeding in questions and moving things along. Chabon energetically defended and riffed on the idea of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who could break out the deepest geek shibboleths at need, talked about encounters with Stan Lee and Will Eisner, and generally paid homage to the culture that had energized a lot of his work.

If there was a narrative line to the appearance, it was the tale of Chabon's gradual coming-out as a genre fiction fan and author. He painted a vivid picture of a lit/nerd's progress. He was born in 1963, and grew up during a Lee/Kirby hegemony, immersed in genre fiction of all kinds - Lovecraft, Conan Doyle, Moorcock, Leiber (if I judge Gentlemen of the Road's influences correctly). In the days pre-internet, even pre-VHS, fans of pulpy genre work had a lonelier watch to keep, turning out for only the rare face-to-face moments at screenings and conventions.

When he tried to bring this material to the MFA fiction program at U. C. Irvine, he was frozen out - it was still the age of Carver, of brief, lapidary studies of broken marriages. He made a breakout debut with Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but the material that had such a hold on his imagination and sense of identity only gradually made its way back into his fiction - comic book allusions in Wonder Boys, where he pushed some of his genre passion onto a fictional alter ego, a Lovecraftian author name August Van Zorn (who at one point was purported to have written a collection entitled The Abominations of Plunkettsburg). Then the early slipstream of Werewolves in Their Youth, then the full-on comics fest of Kavalier and Klay, which at the time seemed like a dead-end project. He credits comics fans as the early adopters of the work that helped turn it into a success.

This narrative was framed within a larger story of a kind of nerd cultural insurgency by which the literary and artistic worlds are gradually being made safe for geekdom. Since 2000, we've seen Lethem's Fortress of Solitude followed, Susannah Clarke, Kelly Link, and so many new slipstream authors we're at a point where it's hard to count them all. As staple SF magazines like Asimov's Science Fiction lost prominence, McSweeney's took on their role in a high-art guise. Chabon edited McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, where he deliberately mixed genre authors and literary fiction writers.

He also described the backlash his fantasy novel Summerland received, and pointed out that on the other side of the coin, a high-art author like Cormac McCarthy can write Westerns and post-apocalyptic SF, but will never get moved over to that side of the bookstore, because "if it's good, it can't be SF."

But if it's a gradual struggle, victory feels inevitable. The hardened boundaries between high and low culture handed down from the early 20th century can't stand forever. As Chabon pointed out, 1963 was a year with a powerful cohort including Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo Del Toro, and Jonathem Lethem is only a year behind. Today, the closeted nerd artists have now infiltrated culture's governing institutions as editors, studio execs, and reviewers. Today, our boundary-annihilating president collects Conan the Barbarian comics.

Image via ToFuGuns.

At the Chuck roundtable interviews at Wondercon, Fedak told us we'll see "more of the scifi side" of Chuck. In the recent episode "Chuck Vs. The Suburbs," you saw a bit more of the "scifi underpinnings of the show," including the secrets of the Intersect, the super-spy database that's downloaded into Chuck's head. "That kind of rabbit hole, and that kind of mythology of how it works, we'll be getting further into it," said Fedak.

The show was always intended to be sort of "a quarterlife crisis" show with espionage and action and zany comedy, said Fedak. The show doesn't have a third-season pickup yet, but Fedak and co-producer Josh Schwartz feel good about its prospects.

They showed a reel of scenes from the rest of the season, and it included tons and tons of Yvonne Strahovski kicking ass in her underwear, lots of bondage and fighting, and Chuck squealing like a little girl. And what looked like a pole-dancing Tricia Helfer! And there are hints that evil spy organization Fulcrum is getting a lot closer to figuring out Chuck's secret.

Chuck tries to track down his father and just gets his envelopes returned to sender. He says something to Sarah about how the U.S. government has hurt everyone he loves, and Sarah says maybe the government should help him for a change. So Sarah helps him track down his dad (Scott Bakula), who's sort of a crazy trailer guy. Chuck brings his dad home, and Chuck's sister Ellie is upset, and says "I thought you were just going for pancakes!" Chuck tells Ellie that their dad is all they have left, and maybe they should try to make it work with him.

Later, we saw some glimpses of Chevy Chase, playing the evil mogul who's a rival to Chuck's dad, as well as - wait for it - a Fulcrum heavy. Bakula says, "Please, he's my son." "Congratulations!" says Chase. "Kill his son now."

Other stuff we learned about at the Chuck roundtables and panel:

Y The Last Man: The Y The Last Man poster in Chuck's bedroom was supposed to be there in season one, but it took a year to get clearance for it. Everything in Chuck's bedroom is a clearance nightmare, said Fedak and star Zachary Levi. Levi found out about that series when a woman told him that he was the only person she could see starring in it, and he started reading it and became a huge fan. (And apparently, there's an internet campaign to cast Levi as Yorick in the movie.)

The series finale includes Bakula, Chase, Morgan Fairchild and Bruce Boxleitner. And as you've heard, it's a "game changer" that sets up a very different status quo for season three, if one happens.

There are actually two weddings towards the end of this season, not just one. (My money's on Morgan's mom.) And there are crazy twists and turns and stuff.

The economy is going to hit the Buy More, but it doesn't sound like the store will go under. But you may be seeing some people downsized from other, better jobs, coming to work at the Buy More because it's all that's left.

Zachary Levi enjoys getting his ass kicked by Yvonne Strahovski. That started back in the first season, when they were filming a promo where Sarah teaches Chuck some martial arts, and she's supposed to twist his arm or something. It wasn't gelling, so Levi suggested Strahovski slap him instead. They had to do 20 takes of that slap but it was still worth it because it was funny. Thus was born the tradition of Strahovski kicking Levi's ass, which Levi likes. "It's very satisfying for me too," says Strahovski.

We caught up with Snyder, the director of the new Watchmen movie, and Gibbons, the artist of the original graphic novel, at Wondercon, where they were promoting the film alongside the cast. They showed about 15 minutes of footage from the film, including a big chunk of the film's beginning, with its hilarious McLaughlin Group sequence (sexy Eleanor Clift!) followed by the Comedian's murder and the credits over the montage of Watchmen's alternate history. And then Rorschach's investigation, and the two Nite Owls meeting up, followed by Rorschach's visit to Nite Owl and then jumping forward to Rorschach in prison.

So when I was sitting next to Dave Gibbons and Zack Snyder, at the press roundtable, I was struggling to come up with a question they hadn't already answered a million times. So I decided to ask them about the relationship between worldbuilding and superhero origins. The superhero origin is the often formulaic story of someone who either discovers superpowers or decides to become a superhero, and then confronts his/her heroic destiny while confronting some greater threat. And watching the first 10 minutes of Watchmen, I was really struck by how much it used the conventions of superhero origin stories to fill in the details of this alternate world - both because the superheroes are instrumental in spawning a different timeline, but also because we see the superheroes coming into themselves as the history unfolds.

Luckily, Gibbons and Snyder understood my somewhat wonky question, and their answers were revealing and interesting. Gibbons said he'd almost forgotten that originally Moore had only had plotted six issues for Watchmen, and then he found out he actually had 12 issues. So he decided, "We have time to do a bit more with the characters." The finished product spends a lot of time focusing on the characters' origins, says Gibbons, and "it's about why would you wear a costume, why would you fight crime." As much as it's about history and politics and society, it's also about where these particular characters come from.

Snyder added that coming to this story afterwards and recreating it for film, you get a "more pure experience" than starting out with a story and then doubling the length by examining more of the backstory.

In the traditional superhero comic, you get the first issue where you meet the superhero and discover how he/she became super, says Gibbons. And then in the second issue, you see the superhero fighting more villains and discover more of why he/she wants to fight evil. Watchmen mixes up both those stories into one seamless whole.

Another difference between Watchmen and the traditional superhero movie, according to Snyder: it's not the typical three-act structure, it's actually more like a four-act structure. Instead of a beginning, middle and end, it has a beginning, a middle, a second beginning, and then the end. In fact, at one point, he and the other creators were briefly talking about splitting it into two movies, and the natural break-points would be either Rorschach getting arrested, or Rorschach getting set free. Or you could break the story when Dr. Manhattan is on Mars, but that's a scary and bewildering place to leave the audience, said Snyder.

Other revelations from the Wondercon Watchmen panel and roundtables:

Ocean's Eleven The studio originally had an idea of doing an Ocean's Eleven type cast, comprised of huge movie stars, but that ended up not happening. Snyder talked to Tom Cruise for a while, but he was busy with Valkyrie, and Snyder was never sure what role Cruise would play.

Rorschach's Audition Tape Jackie Earle Haley was so eager to do the role of Rorschach, he filmed an audition tape in his living room, with a "slightly dodgy Rorschach mask." He did the scene where Rorschach is talking to a psychiatrist and screams, "Give me back my face!" Snyder was blown away and couldn't imagine giving the role to anyone else after that. He showed that tape to a bunch of people, until an embarrassed Haley asked him not to. (And the tape won't be a DVD extra, also because Haley didn't want to include it.) Haley told us in the roundtable that the tape was "cheesy" and that Snyder said he liked it for "the passion," which is a nice way of saying, "Dude, it sucked, but I loved the passion."

The Director's Cut The movie's "director's cut" is three hours and ten minutes, and will hopefully have a theatrically run in July. Stuff that didn't make the cut includes extra violence, more blue nudity, Hollis Mason's death, and some other "bits and bobs." Snyder actually included some extra "blue nudity" in his movie, to give Warners something to trim out of the movie. He had a whole "blue penis" meeting with Warner Bros. where they asked him to include a bit less of Dr. Manhattan's wang. "I don't think anybody's going to feel they were cheated, either of violence or of blue nudity," Snyder said of the theatrical version.

The Original Script The script that the studio gave Snyder, when he first agreed to do the movie, ended with Nite Owl killing Ozymandias by crashing the Owl-ship into him via remote control. Nite Owl even says a cool catch phrase immediately afterwards.

Nite Owl's Formula. To play Nite Owl II, Patrick Wilson gained 20 pounds, and then struggled to keep them on during all the fight training he had to do. He ate tubs of GNC formula that's pure calories, and also tons of ice cream.

Oh, and the clip to the left is from the promos for Entertainment Tonight, which also showed a smidgen of new T4 footage. Here are my impressions of the trailer, which is showing in front of Watchmen:

You see some machines, and then a Terminator skull, and the word "2018." John Connor's voice says: "We've been fighting a long time. We're outnumbered by machines. Humans have a strength that cannot be measured. This is John Connor. If you're listening to this, you are the resistance." During all this, there are postapocalyptic scenes of nastiness, including people penned up in huge enclosures, and Connor talking on the radio and shooting a skeletal T-600 under his crashed helicopter, with people jumping out of the helicopter behind him. "Something has changed," says Connor as a Harvester rips an old lady out of a gas station through a hole in the roof. Skynet is "taking human prisoners, and replicating human tissue."

Then there's a sequence in the trailer which deals with Marcus Wright, who's clearly revealed to be a machine. Marcus is dragged into the rebels' headquarters, and Bryce Dallas Howard says, "Let's see what we've got here." They examine Marcus, realize he's part metal, and then Common bashes Marcus in the head (we see the head-bashing from Marcus' point of view.) "This thing is something we've never seen before." And then John Connor is looking at a chained-up Marcus, who says "My name is Marcus Wright." "You think you're human," Connor says. "I am human," Marcus insists. And then Connor loosens the chains on Marcus' head enough to let him look down and see his own metal body. Marcus screams.

And then there are machine legs marching, and a T-600 shooting at people. The T-600 attacks Marcus, and then we see Marcus telling Connor he can help (more on that below). There's bombing and explosions, and then Marcus throws a stool at a glass wall, breaking out of a facility somewhere. Connor screams, "If we don't stay the course, we are all dead!" And then a partly machine-faced Marcus says, "I'm the only hope you have." There are more explosions and then the thing of the cityscape exploding and turning into a skeleton face (from the motion poster.)

McG also showed us a couple of clips from the movie:

Clip #1: The gas station scene. I think part of this one has been shown before. Kyle Reese, Marcus and a little girl played by Will Smith's daughter Jada Grace pull up to a gas station seeking supplies. They find a bottle of milk, but then a ton of armed guys jump out and surround them. Marcus says these guys aren't going to help them, but then an old lady says they can't leave until Jada gets something to eat. The leader of the armed thugs starts arguing with her about giving up their food, but then there's a weird noise and the milk bottle explodes, followed by the lead thug. A Harvester smashes through the roof and grabs the old lady. All the thugs jump in their vehicles and race away, but the Harvester blows them all up.

"We can't just run for it," says Kyle. So instead they get in a fuel tanker and Marcus opens the tank, leaving a trailer of fuel. He crashes the fuel tank into the Harvester and then disconnects from it and drives off. He tries to blow up the fuel by shooting at it, but no good. So Jada finds a flare and he tosses it into the gasoline. BOOM! Everything blows up - the Harvester, the cars, the gas station, everything.

But the Harvester emerges and launches Moto-terminators, the motorcycle attackers. And they zoom off after our heroes. They dodge lots of debris on the highway. Kyle shoots and manages to flip one of the Mototerminators over and it crashes into a bus. And then they roll off the road and drive through the wildnerness, knocking into derelict cars. One Mototerminator jumps off a bridge in front of their truck, and Marcus knocks out the windshield of their vehicle and the Mototerminator shoots at them. Kyle nearly falls out and nearly gets hit by a school bus, but Marcus pulls him back in. They manage to blow up that Mototerminator, but there's one left. They finally hook the truck's hookup onto it and send it flying and hitting cars. Then a flying Hunter/Killer comes and blows up the bridge they're on. BOOM!

Clip #2: Marcus and John Meet In A Swamp. There's a swamp where everything is on fire, and John Connor is in another helicopter. Someone on the copter throws a flare into the water, and it attracts some hydrobots. A machine jumps up and attacks the helicopter, taking out all its controls and windshield. They shoot at the machines, as the chopper falls into the water. (How many choppers does Connor crash in this movie?) Connor looks for his friend, but there's just a ton of blood in the water. He jumps onto the sinking helicopter and shoots at all the machines, then finally he's in the water, shooting his machine gun at Hydrobots that keep popping out of the water and attacking him. You see his legs in the water and he's surrounded by Hydrobots. He runs out of ammo, and a Hydrobot nearly gets him before he switches to a handgun.

Then Marcus gets out of the water. Connor nearly kills him, but Marcus says Kyle Reese is in Skynet, and he can get Connor in there. Connor is skeptical, but then Marcus says, "Look at me." His face is all peely now and you can see all the metal under his skin. "That's what I'm trying to do," Connor says. Someone shouts something (on the radio I think) and then Marcus says "Make your choice." Connor says, "You get me in. You tell me where I can find Kyle Reese. Yeah?" Connor throws something to Marcus and he puts it away, then backs off slowly with his hands up. Connor follows him, yelling, "What are you?" Marcus doesn't know. He swims away.

So those two clips were pretty revealing, and then we also learned a lot about the new film from the panel and the roundtables afterwards:

Kate Connor was stuck in that mountain with John Connor for years, waiting for the radiation to clear. And when they came out, they had a struggle getting people to believe them and follow them, when there were more experienced military people around wanting to take charge. Oh, and Kate Connor is seven months pregnant! This means Kate doesn't get to do too much action, but Bryce Dallas Howard told our journalists' roundtable that she did try to convey the kind of strength and sense of being accustomed to fear and loss that military brats like Kate grow up with.

Kyle Reese is as close to the original version as Anton Yelchin could get him, even down to the walk and the Nike high-tops he wears, plus that string harness he keeps his gun in. "Who wants to see a Terminator movie where it's not the Kyle Reese you know from T1?" asked Yelchin. Kyle is sort of a father figure to Jada Grace's character, who kicks tons of ass in the film and wields a big shotgun. And in turn, Marcus is kind of a father figure to Kyle Reese, who gets captured by Skynet before we really learn that Marcus is a machine. There's one scene at the end of the movie where Kyle and Marcus are together, and Yelchin said they tried to include a bit of subtext about how Kyle feels about the fact that his father figure was deceiving him.

And McG told us in the roundtable that Reese being imprisoned at Skynet is Skynet's newest plan: it tried to kill Sarah Connor and John Connor in the first two movies, and now it's trying to kill Kyle Reese before he can father John Connor, and lure Connor and friends in to try and rescue him, so it can get all of them in one place. Oh, and Yelchin knows nothing about that rumor he's up to star in Green Lantern.

Moon Bloodgood from Journeyman plays a super-tough resistance leader who carries the flag for James Cameron's female action heroes. But she also goes topless in the film - maybe. McG made a huge big deal of making Moon Bloodgood stand up so we could look at her breasts (fully clothed) and asked if we wanted to see "Moon's boobs" in the movie. He said he's arguing with the studio right now over whether to keep Moon's boobs in the film. I am so not kidding. Afterwards, at the roundtable, McG told us he saw Moon's breasts as expressing the human softness that's what we're fighting the machines for, and they're like the opposite of the hard machine world, but on the other hand maybe it's just a gratuitous juvenile scene that drags down an otherwise serious movie, and that's what he's debating with the studio right now. And Moon herself told reporters the scene is very tasteful and she felt very comfortable with it. And the scene is about knowing you could die soon and wanting to be close to another person, without any barriers in the way. Including clothing.

The new Trek trailer will play before Friday's Watchmen release, but we got a sneak peek at it. Here's my imperfect summary:

You see Kirk zooming on his motorcycle, but this time there's a different snippet of Kirk's conversation with Enterprise Captain Christopher Pike. Kirk has his barfight, and Pike says he couldn't believe it when he found out who Kirk was. Kirk says "Why are you talking to me, man?", like in the Superbowl trailer, and then Pike explains that Kirk's father, George, was captain of a starship (the Kelvin) for 12 minutes. During that brief time, Kirk Sr. saved 800 lives, including that of baby James. "I dare you to do better," Pike says. "Enlist in Starfleet."

And then we see a bunch of cadets, including James Tiberius, and Spock says, "You will experience fear. Fear in the face of certain death." Then Kirk, Sulu and Redshirt are skydiving onto that orbital drilling platform over Vulcan, and someone shouts "pull your chute, go, go, go!" They're diving and then Kirk is trying to hold onto the platform by his fingertips and scraping down like a cartoon character. Then there's a snippet of a spacey scene and someone saying "We received a distress call," which I'm guessing is the Kobayashi Maru test that Kirk cheats on in Starfleet academy. And then Nero saying he's waited for this moment his whole life.

And then a planet caving in and collapsing inwards - actually imploding - which I think might be Vulcan, after Nero's drilling platform kicks in.

And then Leonard McCoy says that the Enterprise has no captain and no first officer and nobody to replace them. "Yeah we do," Kirk says, sitting proudly in the captain's chair despite his black cadet shirt.

And then we see a flash of Kirk on the ice planet looking all frosty and upset. And then some other brief shots, and Pike says something about Kirk's destiny, and asks what path will Kirk choose. Spock hugs Uhura (aww). And Sulu fights the Romulans on the drilling platform. And then Kirk, Sulu and Redshirt are in freefall as well.

And Nero says, "James T. Kirk was a great man. But that was another life." (Presumably referring to the fact that this is a new timeline, after Nero went back in time and killed Kirk's parents and otherwise screwed with Kirk's history.) Someone yells "FIre torpedos!" Pike yells, "Emergency evasive!" And Nero shouts "Fire everything!" And then everything explodes. BOOM! The end.

There was a panel discussion with director J.J. Abrams, producer Bryan Burk, writer/producer Roberto Orci, and stars Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana and Zachary Quinto. Abrams bent over in several directions to assure the fans that he really is making the Trek movie for them, despite his statements in the mainstream press about how the film is "not for Trekkies." "We love and are beholden to existing fans of Star Trek," Abrams said. And he said the movie follows Trek canon as much as the original series did - which means pretty well, but not perfectly, since the original series had a lot of contradictions. Orci also added that the film is "a prequel and a sequel," and fans will see how it's building on everything that came before.

Quinto says he and the other actors just saw the movie for the first time, and he couldn't speak for 20 minutes afterwards, because it was so awesome.

Someone asked Abrams if it was true that he rapped on set, and he said it was more like he beatboxed - which he went on to demonstrate for the audience with a little help from MC Chris Pine. "Star Trek in the house."

Someone asked PIne what Trek episodes were his favorite for capturing who Kirk was, and he did a total Shatner impression: "I'M CAPTAIN KIRK!" Then Pine said: "That would be up there - the evil Captain Kirk, the split Captain Kirk one. [Also the one ] where he fights Finnegan. When he wrestles the young boy [Charlie X], I think, I don't know if I would do that. I think what I found about watching the old series is, Mr. Shatner's incredibly funny. I think it's the same humor he brings to Boston Legal, in a whole different way. It's that twinkle in his eye, that you think anything can happen... [That's] something I couldn't recreate."

Finally, Abrams took a question about the Cloverfield sequel. He said they have an idea that they're working on right now that would be "pretty sweet." It's something "connected to Cloverfield," but it sounded like it's not necessarily a straight-up sequel. And he added, "The key, obviously, to doing any kind of sequel is, it better not be a business decision. You better be inspired to do something. That way, you did it because you cared, not because you think you can make a buck."

1. Environmental Guilt. Many people are paralyzed by guilt over how much we've trashed the environment, and though they try to buy green and recycle they are overwhelmed with a sense of hopelessness. Trying to cope with this, people yearn for stories about a world where humans aren't around anymore to muck things up.

2. Future Ennui. Sometimes it seems like we do nothing but plan for the future: You have to do everything from balancing your homework load so you can get into college, to balancing your checkbook so you'll have retirement savings. Living your daily life while planning for tomorrow can be a huge drain on your mental resources. You're constantly asking yourself about what to do now to make the future work out. Which politician should we vote for to improve our neighborhoods or our nation? How can we plan for a perfect vacation, a perfect wedding, or a perfect science project? Stories about a world without people are relaxing. We don't have to worry what we would do because we're just not there.

3. Fear of Extinction. OK, this one is obvious. We may be sick of planning for the future, but we're also scared shitless that the future will smack us on the head and wipe us all out. Who could have predicted Hurricane Katrina or the Asian Tsunami? What if next time the disaster is global in scale? We imagine the world without ourselves as a coping mechanism, a way to accustom ourselves to the idea that no matter how much we plan, we still may not make it as a species.

4. Evolution Degree Zero. A world without humans is a world where we've hit the reset button. All our mistakes are undone, and we can start fresh. Maybe humans will evolve again, better this time.

The formerly comics-focused Wondercon was much more about movies and TV this year, especially with DC being tight-lipped, Marvel skipping it and Image canceling at the last minute. And many of the most popular narratives had to do with war and political upheaval.

Conspiracy theories: Anti-establishment paranoia is back, and X-Files 2 is its harbinger. We still don't have a clear sense of what the new X-Files movie will be about, but writer/director Chris Carter said the show's conspiracy-mania had gone out of fashion after 9/11, but now it was making a comeback. We already know the movie won't be about the show's overarching "mythos," but that doesn't mean it won't feature government cover-ups and conspiracies. After all, it'll be competing with the new Indiana Jones movie, which apparently is about Area 51 and Roswell. Cover-ups are cool!
And then there was the Jericho panel, where producer Carol Barbee said the show's writers "don't talk politics" — and then proceeded to talk about politics for an hour. Besides the way Jericho's evil government contractor Ravenwood was a direct metaphor for Halliburton and Blackwater in Iraq, Barbee also talked about the ripped-from-the-headlines terrorism plots and Homeland Security paranoia on her show.
The war machine: And meanwhile, the direct-to-DVD Starship Troopers 3 turned out to be a satirical war movie, in which weird government propaganda for super-bombs jostled with Fleet recruiting ads, in a war that's gone on too long and lost public support. (Sound like anything in real life to you?) And speaking of war movies, the new Iron Man film keeps the comics' backstory about Tony Stark being a high-tech weapons merchant who has a crisis of conscience after he's taken prisoner. And Iron Man is serving as a metaphor for the military-industrial complex in the comics as well, according to Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics. Wolk dropped some science about how World War Hulk and Civil War are metaphors for the backlash against the government crackdown after 9/11.

So where were the right-wing narratives, about evil terrorists, weak left-wing governments and cultural elites repressing everybody else? We didn't run across them as much. My guess is, wait until year two or three of an Obama or Clinton presidency, and suddenly you'll have all the conservative space fantasies that you could ever want, from the likes of Frank Miller. We can't wait!

The film is a Matrix-meets-cyborgs story featuring incredible animation, tons of bullets, lots of John Woo signature slow-motion, and even some cyborg doves. It's arguably, in this blogger's opinion, superior to the original Appleseed, and is at its best when things devolve into pure bullets and octane action. Thankfully, the multi-layered story is cerebral fodder as well as eye candy, so you won't get bored while you watch another clip of armor-piercing bullets get emptied into mindless robo-slaves.

Sadly nobody captured the moment when I was a little tanked up, walked up to Brian Posehn from the Sarah Silverman Program (he's also done a postapocalyptic comic book called The Last Christmas), and yelled, "Sarah Silverman Program ROCKS!!!" Bless his heart, Posehn just rolled his eyes instead of punching me.

You can see more photos here, by Alexis Barrera from Brain Eater Books.

The story starts out in the 1950s, and heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman are fighting in Korea and Indochina, but she takes a mucher harsher stand than he does, letting victimized women deal out there own brand of murderous justice. He warns her that's the reason Batman is now a fugitive and the Justice Society is disbanded.

We're also introduced to both The Martian Manhunter and Hal "Green Lantern" Jordan in short order, long before they become the heroes we've come to know. We find out how the Manhunter comes to Earth, and how Hal loses his nerve during the Korean war and spends time in a psych hospital. While the Manhunter is trapped on Earth and spends his time watching television (there's an amusing scene where he emulates Groucho Marx and Bugs Bunny), Jordan tries to get into the space program, and eventually gets hired by the Ferris company, run by the boss' wife Carol Ferris.

Over the course of the film, while Jordan develops into a stand-up test pilot and gets drafted into a mission to Mars (sans ring), and the Manhunter fights crime as detective John Jones, different heroes begin unraveling a plot by something called The Center. At first it's not clear if it's a cult, some form of mind-control, or an alien invasion. Additionally, certain heroes like The Flash are being sought by the government, who want to unmask them and expose them and have them register, just like in the recent Civil War series from Marvel. The trouble is, it feels tacked on and cheesy, even though it's the most interesting idea in the film.

In the climactic ending, a whole slew of heroes including Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Martian Manhunter, Adam Strange, the Blackhawks, and a ton of others do battle with the Cthulhu-like Center. When things are at their bleakest, Hal Jordan finally accepts the role of Green Lantern, and the ring he was given by the dying alien Abin Sur comes to his aid and gives him a little instruction manual brain-video lesson. They triumph over the dinosaur-spewing baddie, and thus the Justice League is formed. Montages of many more heroes (including the Teen Titans) and villains scroll by as portions of John F. Kennedy's 1960 Democratic National Convention speech play in the background.

Darwyn's art-style is retro-vintage hipster cool, and the heroes are extremely well voice acted (by a pretty impressive list of stars including everyone from Kyle MacLachlan to Lucy Lawless to Neil Patrick Harris... who aren't distracting), but the plot feels mish-mashed together, and needed to be either a miniseries, or a two-part movie. The Flash's "the government is oppressing us!" speech on television could have been the start of a terrific storyline about the persecution of heroes, but it ends up feeling like it was excised far too early.

Also, there are a lot of heroes tossed into the mix who aren't given any lines at all, like Green Arrow and Ted "Wildcat" Grant, and fleeting scenes of folks like Adam Strange. There's a lot of DC comics history being presented in only an hour and a half, and as a result it feels lacking. Some of the animated scenes feel a bit like afternoon cartoons, but other sequences (especially those in space or with planes in flight) are extremely well-done, which add to the feeling that the whole project is uneven.

It'll be interesting to see this when it comes out on DVD, seeing as how they excised certain scenes and changed the story from the graphic novel. There are a slew of extra materials and interviews on the disc, which will hopefully fill some holes. While it's not perfect, it's much preferable to the nothing, which is all we've had in the form of original animated films based on DC Comics properties. If they could spend some more time hammering out the stories and improving the animation, this could be a series that lasts for years. Just give us some Kingdom Come pretty darn soon.

We didn't see much more of Iron Man than you did if you watched the Superbowl commercial a few weeks ago, but director Jon Favreau did let it slip that he had to do some very creative editing to make this flick kid-friendly. No wonder, given that Iron Man as a character is about as dark as you can get: in recent series Civil War, he led the government crackdown on the superhero community, rounding up his cohorts and forcing them to be placed under surveillance under the Superhero Registration Act.

Starship Troopers III writer and director Ed Neumeier, who worked on the first film, said the new film will be a lot more darkly satirical. The soldiers are sick of the war, and just want to go home. It's based much more faithfully on the original Heinlein novel, and from what we could see from the hefty clips they showed us the action scenes will be fun and exciting to watch. A new generation of bugs have cool robo-suits that make them look like a cross between bug and Tripod from War of the Worlds.

And of course the biggest draw of the weekend was the new X-Files movie, which is being shot even as I write. The packed crowd of thousands was going crazy for every little word dropped by director Chris Carter, and the teeny taste of the movie we got to see was exciting. X-Files protagonists Scully and Mulder have always been morally ambiguous — even, at times, obviously insane. And the new flick has 9/11 looming over it like a dark cloud. The fans couldn't stop talking about conspiracy theories about how the original series was destroyed by the 9/11 disaster, and even Carter admitted the movie had to wait until the mood in the country was lighter again. Just to prove how light their moods were, stars Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny spent a while joking about how XF3 should be about Mulder's experiments with autoerotic asphyxiation. (And we got it on tape — you can see it if you click through.)

For the first major convention of the year, Wondercon was surprisingly light on any real news, with the biggest player, DC Comics first suggesting that they were going to tell us something big the next day, and then telling us that they'd rather wait until April after all. The lack of any major surprises to take away from the con (Both of the stories that actually did break, J. Michael Straczynski working for DC Comics and Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan working on new issues of Demo for Vertigo, seemed to be common knowledge on the con floor before their official announcements) seemed to affect the regular con-goers with an unusual feeling of malaise hitting even the 501st Legion as they performed con security. This wasn't helped by the no-shows from creators - not only was the Image Comics panel cancelled, but both Boom! Studios' Mark Waid and Aspen Studio's Michael Turner failed to make it to the show.

That isn't to say that the entire show was a disaster, mind you; the pros who did make it there were entertaining and available - Particular shout-outs should be given to Oni Press's James Lucas Jones (Expect me to tell you all about Wonton Soup very soon) as well as DC's Jann Jones and Dan DiDio, whose late-Sunday panel "For The Love of Comics" turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable conversation not about upcoming DC Comics but what is awesome about comics in general (Goofiness and obsessive collecting being two of the answers), entirely free of the kind of hucksterism that you might expect from a DC panel.Bill Willingham proved to be a fine gentleman able to keep people's attention throughout the various panels he dominated (and I'm not just saying that because of his apology to me about this), and even if some DC panels may have been half-empty, the two showings of the animated version of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier were packed with enthusiastic fans (With good reason; it's a better movie than I expected).

That's not even talking about Saturday's CBLDF party that we co-sponsored, populated by the creme de la creme of comics folk, from retailers to creators (Hi, Cecil!) to fans, with we journalist types mingling and posing for photos that I feel like I should be apologizing for; I didn't mean for my head to be that shiny. Overall, it may not have been the most exciting weekend in terms of comic conventions - that'll be San Diego Comic-Con in July - but it was definitely a fine, exhausting, one nonetheless.

For those of you who haven't read the Planet Hulk and World War Hulk series, here's the quickie back story: Iron Man and his gang called the Illuminati blast Hulk into space for the "safety" of the human race. (Because, you know, the Hulk is always smashing and stuff.) Hulk crash-lands on a planet where he can at last be the hero he never was on Earth — he fights with a bunch of oppressed aliens against evil humanoid overlords, wins, gets crowned king, and marries an ultra-awesome, super-strong alien who becomes his queen.

Everything goes bad when the ship Iron Man and Co. sent him to space in suddenly blows up. Queen is killed, and Hulk's new home is ravaged. He and his alien buddies (his "warbound") go back to Earth to get their revenge on Iron Man. Hulk is so mad, and so righteous, that he's gotten bigger and greener than I've ever seen him. I mean, he is so strong he can withstand space vacuum and smash up the moon.

His showdown with Iron Man stretched across several comic book crossovers. I highly recommend the series, especially Planet Hulk. And for the record, Wolk is totally right in this clip. You won't be able to deny it after reading.

Another famous recent example of comic book allegory that Wolk discussed is in Mark Millar's Civil War series, all about the Superhero Registration Act. Apparently, however, Millar denies the importance of allegory in the series, calling it "just gravy." Wolk also talked about Grant Morrison's 7 Soldiers of Victory ("It's about meshing together different forms of enlightenment.") and Green Lantern vs. Sinestro ("Green Lantern is thoughtful about how power can affect the world, while Sinestro uses fear to gain power.").

Want more Wolk? Check out his book Reading Comics.

• The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the story of Sarah Connor trying to protect her future-leader son and avert the end of the world, is "funnier than i thought it would be," Friedman said. "I think it's hysterical." Dekker clowns around, like, all the time on the set, Glau said. (This was easy to believe, judging from Dekker's antics on stage.)
• 
  
• Friedman wanted to bring back Kyle Reese, the time traveler who fathered John Connor and then died in the first Terminator movie. But his fellow producers convinced him this would never fly with the fans. So instead he finally agreed to introduce Reese's brother, Derek, played by 90210's Brian Austin Green.
• 
  
• Austin Green has a sense of humor about the fact that he's an unlikely (and unpopular, in some quarters) action hero. "When I think action, I think Brian Austin Green," he joked. "He DJs, he shoots guns, it'll be awesome." He takes comfort in the fact that even the most hostile fans have started referring to him in online forums by his character's name instead of the actor's, which means they're starting to accept him. "I'm going to come away from this show really honestly feeling like science fiction kicks ass," he added. "It's the first chance I've had to do it, and really, fucking praise the Terminator, it's been a great experience."
• 
  
• The producers of the Terminator TV show haven't given next year's big-screen Terminator 4, starring Christian Bale, a second thought. The existence of multiple contradictory Terminator narratives is fine, because even without the TV show you couldn't make everything hold together as one canon, insisted Executive Producer John Wirth.
• 
  
• The show's first season was shortened due to the writers' strike, but luckily next week's two-hour finale ends with a decent cliffhanger. And Friedman is lumping together his plans for the original end of season one with the planned second season to create a new second season.
• 
  
• Several people asked Glau why she always plays somewhat robotic killing machines, and she didn't really have much of an answer. She said her Terminator was similar to River, her character on Firefly, because both are "isolated in the way they relate to the world." But a key difference is that River uses martial arts, whereas her Terminator just uses brute force. So she's having to un-learn some stuff.
• 
  
• We'll see more of Teresa Dyson, the widow of potential Skynet creator Miles Dyson, again on the show. But not this season.
• 
  
• Glau is still hoping to create a ballet with composer/writer Joss Whedon, but she's not sure when it'll happen. "It was going to work out better when we were on strike. We wanted to do the ballet for years because Joss writes his own music and I do my own dancing, so i thought it was an amazing idea. But now he's been thrown into an amazing project [the Dollhouse TV show] and i have to go back to work. But we're hoping to do it this season. We're nailing down concepts," Glau said.

Jericho seems to have gone from being a pretty conservative narrative to a much more radical one. The first season revolved around a vision of the American heartland pulling together after the cities vanished — plus a "clash of the patriarchs" among mayor Johnston Green, his rival Gray Anderson, and Phil Constantino, the sheriff of neighboring town New Bern. And now, in the second season, the rival patriarchs have vanished and the show is much more about the younger characters and their distrust of all authority. And the over-arching plot arc seems to revolve around an arch-conservative government that's lying about the reasons for the nuclear explosions, to cover its own involvement.

So I asked Barbee whether there had been a conscious shift in the show's politics between the first and second seasons.

Barbee responded that "We don't talk politics in the writers' room. We talk characters." The main reason there's less focus on rival patriarchs this season is because Johnston Green, the main characters' father, died in the first season finale. "Johnston Green was always meant to die," Barbee said, calling the show a remake of The Lion King. "Johnston Green had to die so that Jake could step up," and his generation could be faced with having to live up to Johnston's legacy. But there was no intention to change the show's politics, she insisted.

Still, it's no coincidence that the show is alluding to the Iraq war during an election war. "We read the papers," said Barbee. "We are influenced by what goes on."

Because the season is only seven episodes instead of the 22 Barbee and her fellow producers had planned, things move at a much more breakneck pace and "there's no time for treading water." She gave a bit more detail about what a 22-episode second season would have looked like, with storylines taking place in Cheyenne, WY (the capital of the new government, which controls the Western U.S.) and New York City. One character would have left New York to travel across the country to Jericho, and we would have seen more of the country through that character's eyes. The three storylines would have come together at the season's end in Cheyenne. But now there won't be any New York stuff.

Barbee also repeated what she'd said before, that the first season was about saving the town, the second season was about saving the country, and the third season (if any) would be about saving the world.

Oh, and Lennie James, who plays badass CIA agent Robert Hawkins, said his character could kick Jack Bauer's ass

In addition to Batman: Death Mask, an original manga by Yoshimori (Togari - The Sword of Justice) Natsume that will be published in authentic back-to-front format, the main DC/Wildstorm project will be DC/Wildstorm: Dreamwar that crosses over characters from both lines. Editor Scott Peterson described the project simply:

Basically, it's the DC Comics heroes versus the Wildstorm heroes, punching.

When asked about the status of the very late Wildcats series by Grant Morrison that disappeared after a mid-2007 first issue, series artist Jim Lee embarrassedly called it "the dreaded question," before admitting that "there's no way to make amends [for the delay]" but both Morrison and Lee are committed to finish the series at some point, although that may be five or ten years from now. Here's hoping that he was sarcastic on that last point. Peterson said that Morrison's other delayed title, The Authority, has had some "serious forward motion" and will be returning at some point.

In response to questions about Warren Ellis's missing titles Desolation Jones and Planetary, Peterson said that, like any publisher, they're very happy to publish work from Warren Ellis when they get it. He has written the final issue of Planetary, but they're waiting for artist John Cassaday to have time in his schedule to draw it.

Jim Lee also talked about his All-Star Batman series with Frank Miller, saying that he enjoys working on the book, and that he's surprised that Miller continues to work on the series considering his movie schedule. The book is slated to run for twenty issues, and they have around ten still to work on.