Someday I must go to the San Diego Comic-Con. Seems like there's always cool stuff happening there.

It seems that among the things happening there was a string of announcements from J. Michael Straczynski. Let's see, we have Ron Howard slated to direct a movie (Changeling) that JMS wrote. We get a 12-episode SF-comedy radio series for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, The Adventures of Apocalypse Al. We get a new JMS TV series called Borrowed Lives. His excellent Rising Stars comic book series will become a TV series. His Midnight Nation graphic novel may become a film, as may a one-off comic book called Dream Police (hadn't heard of that one). He'll also be doing a new comic book called Bullet Points.

Oh yeah, and some Babylon 5 projects. Sure, a B5 video game is coming, but the big news is Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, a direct-to-DVD collection of 20-minute stories, "stories that I wanted to tell during the B5 series but never had the chance to develop." Unlike the previous B5 spinoff attempts, it will focus on the prominent B5 characters -- at least those played by actors still living. (So no G'Kar or Dr. Franklin, but maybe Delenn and Ivanova!) And it will be released next year.

(Thanks to duriyah for sending the link!)

Saturday I took nontacitare to the local comics shop. Between the two of us we bought six graphic novels, among them:
1 "Sandman" ("The Dream Hunters")
2 "Amazing Spider-Man"
1 Batman ("Arkham Asylum")
1 "Black Orchid"
1 "Promethea"
2 written by J. Michael Straczinski
2 written by Neil Gaiman
1 written by Alan Moore
2 drawn by Dave McKean

I was blown away by the second volume of Promethea (a series recommended by featherynscale). The first volume was an intelligent and off-kilter, yet in many ways typical, superhero origin story. But the second one includes a "hyper-reality" sequence with digitized actors, a magic lesson performed as a tantric sex scene, and finally a trip through the Tarot linking the major arcana with evolution and human history and mythology and kaballah and magic and science -- it's impossible to get it all in one reading.


After the comics shop we went to see an entertaining performance of the musical Pippin. That show includes some interesting theatrical elements, the most striking of them being the climactic stripping out of all theatrical elements, down to the bare bright lights shining down on a stage empty of everything but a few uncostumed actors. Another thing I noticed was a high proportion of red-headed actors in the cast -- about a third of them. I started wondering if that was part of an intentional red-themed color scheme going on.