Quotes of the Week: The Revenge of Atticus Finch

The thing that kills me is that a sequel and a prequel for Watchmen are being sought by people at DC in the first place. This doesn't seem to me like out of the box publishing thinking; this seems to me like sad, typical all the way in the box corporate media thinking. I don't want a prequel to Lawrence of Arabia, I don't want to see a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird and I like Watchmen just the way it is as a singular expression of potent pop culture, thank you.
--Tom Spurgeon.

Hating Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is perfectly fine. It's got a style; you sort of embrace it and dig it or you don't. But when there's too much effort given to tut-tutting the people you imagine to be enjoying it, or declaring and promising that only narrow categories of losers and non-life-havers and other stupid annoying hipsters could possibly be having a good time when you're not, it sounds pinched and ungenerous. And, not to put too fine a point on it, a little bit jealous and fearful of obsolescence.
--Linda Holmes.

Quotes of the Week

Strangely, Watchmen is the book that taught me as a teenager not to get wrapped up in the success or failure of someone else's work. By far the most of any work in any form I've ever recommended to other people, Watchmen is the book that's come back to me with a "this was really, really stupid" or some curse-filled approximation thereof. As a 17-year-old with insecurities big enough to keep at least two local psychologists in steak and sports cars, this reaction initially took me back. However, I was also smart enough to know Watchmen had value according to how I decided things had value, and it only took a few seconds to realize that whether or not someone else appreciated something I did wasn't a vote on its overall worth, let alone mine.

--Tom Spurgeon, saying the wisest thing I read all week.

I’m delighted Kate Winslet finally got a Best Actress Oscar, because she deserves it for being so good for so long but also because now that means, pace Halle Berry and Charlize Theron, that she will now immediately make a God-awful action film in which she wears very tight black latex, and I’m all for that.

--John Scalzi, being both wise and funny.

O person like me,
phoneless in your distant café,
I wish we could meet to discuss this,
and perhaps you would help me
murder this woman on her cell phone,

--George Bilgere, in his poem "Bridal Shower," which I really shouldn't quote in full, but you really, really should go read. It's short and awesome (even if you don't like poetry).

..I was under the impression that Warner and DC sat down recently to have a big brainstorming session about how to make a decent DC movie universe, or a least a coherent motion picture release plan, given Marvel's recent box office badassery. If doing Suicide Squad was the end result of that meeting -- if they believe they should be making a Suicide Squad movie before a Wonder Woman movie -- then it is frankly amazing these people can put on their pants in the morning without accidentally strangling themselves.

--Topless Robot, on the news that Warner Bros. is planning a Suicide Squad movie.

Atlantis Journal: Super-Heroes and Sea Monsters

Apologies to Scott Mills for the title of this post.

Namor Loves Aquaman

I always suspected that their rivalry was a cover for something deeper.



By Victor Santos. (This shoulda gone in one of the last two days' galleries, but it was hiding.)

Megan Fox to play superhero

No, no, not that one. I can't believe anyone actually fell for that.

And maybe I'm falling for something equally ridiculous, but Fox's playing aquatic superhero Fathom is a lot more believable than Wonder Woman.

Weeki Wachee Mermaids calendar

As long as we're talking about pretty water-breathers, this is a good time to mention that the 2009 Weeki Wachee Mermaids calendar is now available. Or it will be when the store is back up. It's currently under construction.

Fun Time!

How about a nice mermaid game? (Well, not really a game so much as digital ColorForms.)

Let's eat!



Lila Brooke has some photos from Disney World's new T-Rex restaurant, including this undersea room.

Octodogs



I wonder if T-Rex serves these on the kids' menu. If not, this is the cool (and easy) way to make them.

And as long as we're making sea creatures out of hot dogs...

Cephalopods in a Blanket.

Another reason to make your own squid-creatures

There won't be any in Watchmen. My interest in that movie just decreased by 25%.

A Mouthful of Misfortune to the rescue!



Since Watchmen's letting us down, we'll have to rely on A Mouthful of Misfortune, a Big Fish-like movie about an old sea captain who "tells 'tall' tales from the Indochina Sea" and "lives in an oceanic world of Greek mythos." There's actually much more to it than that; Robert Hood has the story.

The Awesome List: Bone movie and superhero movie costumes.

Bone movie



Warner Brothers has bought the rights to make a movie based on Jeff Smith's Bone series. Oh, please, oh, please, let this work out better than the Nickelodeon deal did.

Why I don't care about the Watchmen movie

Oh, I'm gonna go see it, but I'm really not invested in whether it's good or bad. That's because for all its genius, its point was horribly misunderstood by the superhero creators it influenced and ushered in an era of overly violent, "realistic" superhero comics that we're still trying to live down today.

Watchmen wasn't saying that superhero stories should be all "mature" and gritty. I believe the point was to show how ridiculous they'd be if they continued down that road. But of course it only pushed them further in that direction and I'm not sure that all the blame can be placed on the readers for not getting it. After all, the first thing we learned in Communications 101 was that if a message doesn't get through to the listener, it's not the listener's fault but the communicator's.

Or maybe I'm the one who missed the point. But I don't think so.

Either way, Watchmen: very important influence in comics and enjoyable in its own right, but definitely not one of my favorites. And that's why I can't get all excited either positively or negatively about the movie costumes.

Besides, I agree with Mike Sterling that the only superhero costume worth considering is this one right here.

(Okay, that's not at all what he said, but I'm taking his point and running with it.)