Vintage Interview: Pre-Firefly Gina Torres
Oct 28I had a total flashback yesterday, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly’s list of the cheesiest (read: awesomest) syndicated TV shows. Who here remembers the Cleopatra 2525/Jack of All Trades power hour, circa 2000?!
Don’t lie. I know at least half of you just started wailing “In the YEEEAAAAR twent-eee five twent-eee five! Three women keep hope aliiiive!” At least!
The whole thing was shitloads of fun. Jack had Bruce Campbell, while Cleo boasted a slightly insane premise (cryogenically frozen exotic dancer gets thawed in 2525, helps fight evil robots), scantily-clad eye candy of both genders, and one of the best credits sequences of all time.
Oh, and also? A pre-Firefly Gina Torres. In 2000, I interviewed Gina for the now-defunct IGN Sci-Fi. And I just dug up said interview via the Wayback Machine. Let’s all enjoy a little moment with the woman who would be Zoe. (In retrospect: pretty interesting what she says about The Matrix and Morpheus, eh?)
Read This: Jeri Smith-Ready's Wicked Game
Oct 27
I’m trying to come up with the right words to tell you just how awesome Jeri Smith-Ready’s Wicked Game is. I’m also trying to ensure that these words don’t make me sound like a wild-eyed, slobbering fangirl, because my brain has clamped onto this book with the kind of heightened fervor it usually reserves for stuff like re-analyzing old episodes of Buffy and dissecting continuity issues in the Marvel U. It’s refusing to read anything else and wants to install one of those internet-y countdown clocks in order to tick off the milliseconds ’til the sequel arrives (May 2009!! Put it in your iPhone!). Oh, brain. You do love to get obsessed.
Grok The Vote
Oct 22It’s October, it’s an election year, and a lot of pundits are wondering, “Where’s the October Surprise?” Where is the game-changing enterprise story or force-fed press release that is going to blow the doors off of one of the two candidates – well, maybe more than two, because I know some people are going to vote for Nader and some people are going to vote for Clinton, and I do see a lot of those Roslin/Airlock tees around lately.
The October Surprise starts right here, next Monday. All week, leading up to what Bill Jemas would likely have called U-DECIDE ’08, the Alert Nerd brain trust is going to be rolling out the nerdiest, geekiest, election coverage you can find in the entire universe. Take that, Colbert! We’re calling it Grok the Vote (after the official Alert Nerd ‘zine for the attractive intelligentsia which I know you’re already an avid fan of, right?)
We’ll probably talk about Star Wars a good bit. And Trek. And Lex Luthor. And maybe Dune. So yeah.
Halloween 3. Stupid? Or Advanced?
Oct 21Getting home late last night, I find Halloween 3 is playing on Space (the Canadian answer to the Sci-Fi Channel). Always happy to have something mindless to watch before bed, I watched. It didn’t take long for it to break bad. Here, watch the trailer:
Crap, that’s no help. OK, I’ll summarize – After two go-rounds with Michael Myers, arguably THE movie monster of the second half of the 20th century, the makers of Halloween 3 had a radical idea… make a sequel and NOT have Myers in it. Buh? And then after realizing they greenlit a sequel without the star monster, execs panicked and insisted that the movie have some sort of monster. With the flip of a coin, they agreed on robots. I shit you not.
Batman Vamps
Oct 21(Not some kind of “gawd t’would be KEWL if Batman were a VAMPIRE” post, although, yes, it would be “kewl.”)
DC Comics’ January 2009 solicitations are up…and there’s nary a Gaiman or Kubert to be found on either Batman or Detective Comics:
DETECTIVE COMICS #852
Written by Paul Dini; Art by Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs; Cover by Andrew Robinson
A “Faces of Evil” issue starring Hush! Following the events of “Heart of Hush,” this two-part story starts here and ends in the pages of this month’s BATMAN #685. Catwoman has a score to settle with Hush after their most recent encounter, but Hush isn’t likely to take any attacks quietly. Will anyone be able to temper Selina’s rage, or will she become a face of evil again?BATMAN #685
Written by Paul Dini; Art by Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs ; Cover by Alex Ross
A “Faces of Evil” issue starring Catwoman! Continuing from this month’s DETECTIVE COMICS #852, Selina Kyle’s path of vengeance against Hush knows no bounds! After confronting the man responsible for nearly destroying her life, Selina’s wrath propels her into a downward spiral. With Tommy Elliot almost certain to suffer dire consequences, could Catwoman’s humanity be next to perish?
So we’ve got R.I.P. ending in November, then two quick issues in succession of Batman that are some kind of R.I.P. coda by Morrison. Meanwhile, Dini’s chugging along with his Hush storyline in Detective.
For December, Denny O’Neill takes over Batman and Detective for yet another R.I.P. coda, and then in January, Dini returns for a two-parter that’s a coda to his story that ended two months before.
That’s bat-vamping, right there. I smell a delay for the Gaiman/Kubert story. I hope the vamp gives them time to complete for February. It would suck if Morrison’s storyline had this awesome ending and was followed by six months of fill-ins so that the follow-up can complete.
(The Bat-line is about the only place in comics where I can muster up any level of sincere fanboy excitement these days. Forgive me.)
