“The Black Beetle: Necrologue” is Coming!

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Francesco Francavilla’s Black Beetle is a comic fans love to love.  Part of the reason is that Francesco is such a swell guy.  He gracious, humble and talented.

Francesco has a love — a passion — for comics, monsters, old movies, heroes, and basically all the things that we find cool.  So it was a real joy to discover that his comic mini-series The Black Beetle: No Way Out combined all of those things into a rockin’ story that was a hit with fans and critics alike.

Soon Francesco will be back with The Black Beetle: Necrologue.  You can learn more about it, here thanks to the fine folks at CBR.com.

 

EW Covers The Walking Dead

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I’ve been an Entertainment Weekly subscriber since the first issue, so I should find next week’s edition featuring three Walking Dead covers in my mailbox any day.

In case you don’t subscribe, I thought you might like a heads-up on the three Walking Dead covers that are featured.  Above is the Rick cover, you can also get an issue featuring Darryl or Carl on the cover.

Chaykin – The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow

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Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of Moscownians in 1939?

Howard Chaykin.

Or at least he better since Chaykin is the writer and artist of a new miniseries titled The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow.

What’s the story behind The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow, you ask?  Well according to Howard Chaykin…

“My new miniseries, The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow, tells the secret story behind the Shadow’s disappearance in 1949.”

If you’d like to know more, then click over to CBR for their post Howard Chaykin Reunites with the Shadow for Midnight in Moscow.

24 Interesting Tidbits About “I Love Lucy”

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Here are 24 Interesting Tidbits You May Not Have Known About “I Love Lucy.”

Although I knew most, I was surprised by a couple…

10. The first episode of I Love Lucy aired when Lucille Ball was 41.

and

23. I Love Lucy was the first to series to end its run at No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings.

Thanks to Ashley Perez and Buzzfeed.com who have “Some ‘splaining to do.”

 

The New “Walking Dead” Poster

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That’s the Alex Ross poster that will be available at Comic-Con to promote the up-coming season of AMC’s The Walking Dead.

I’m glad that the poster features art, but I’d have rather seen something from Charles Adlard or Tony Moore.  If they wanted to go with an artist not associated with The Walking Dead, then how about Steranko or Francesco Francavilla?

The 25 Greatest Westerns of All Time

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Recently Hollywood.com posted Christian Blauvelt’s choices for The 25 Greatest Westerns of All Time.

Blauvelt’s list has an interesting mix of classic (“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” – “The Wild Bunch” – etc.), obscure (“The Ruthless Four” – “The Great Silence”), and guilty pleasures (“The Quick and the Dead”). 

My only question is how can ANY list of the 25 Greatest Westerns of All Time not have a spot for “The Outlaw Josey Wales”?

The Top 10 Most Dangerous U.S. Highways

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The red highway shown in the diagram above is Interstate 95.  The stretch of Interstate 95, Florida is not only designated as the #2 most dangerous highway in the United States, but also…

“…has the distinction of being the deadliest highway in America, with a rate of 1.73 fatal accidents per mile…”

I regularly drive a stretch of I-95.  Thankfully, although there are often accidents on this highway, the piece I drive isn’t as bad as the… 

…stretch of (I-95 that) even has its own attorney, ready to sue anyone. 

Gravedigger: The Cover That Never Was

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Don’t you dig this Gold Key cover mock-up for Gravedigger?

Chris Mills explains how the faux cover came about:

I had so much fun mocking up that Gold Key Comics-styled Femme Noir cover yesterday, that last night I dusted off the terrific, painted Gravedigger: The Scavengers variant cover by my friend Fred Harper, and knocked out this retro/faux Gravedigger piece. There’s something kinda subversive about seeing the squeaky-clean Gold Key trade dress & logo on this hardboiled title…

Don’t forget that Gravedigger: Hot Women, Cold Cash by Chris Mills and Rick Burchett is available!  It gets my highest recommendation.

How John Carpenter Turned “The Thing” into a Horror Classic

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John Carpenter’s The Thing is a classic in the horror genre.  Most fans consider it Carpenter’s high-water mark.

What many don’t know is that The Thing  that was released to theaters was very different from what was originally planned and filmed.  When Carpenter saw a rough cut he realized that the movie didn’t work.  It lacked tension (can you believe that?), the pace was slow and MacCready (played by Kurt Russell) was just another face in the crowd.

Luckily a six-week break had been built into the shooting schedule.  During that time Carpenter…

…restructured the film, wrote what was essentially a new Second Act to conform to the editing he had done (including new death scenes for two characters), adopted MacCready as his spiritual doppelganger, and scrambled to get all of it shot on location in Stewart, B.C. Coming face to face with his own greatest fear – fear of failure –  he was able to make THE THING undeniably his…

Stuart Cohen was a co-producer on The Thing.  Cohen was on location during filming and in his blog,   details the changes that Carpenter brought about to turn a movie that didn’t work into a horror classic.