Hopefully everyone survived the Fourth of July weekend with all their fingers, toes and eyebrows intact. There were a couple of big news items of special interest to geeks in our fair city this weekend in addition to the usual crop of geeky happenings.

First off, it seems that 4,233 people did NOT survive the weekend. That is the number of “registered zombies” that turned up for the Red White and Dead zombie walk in Fremont on Saturday. KOMO news is reporting that this number unofficially reclaims the Largest Zombie Walk title for Seattle, easily topping the previous record of 4,026. The record still has to be officially verified which will most likely happen sometime early this week. The KOMO video of the event even made it as far as CNN’s website. Enjoy!

In non-undead news, SF Site is reporting that the Seattle Westercon Organizing Committee has won their bid to host Westercon in Seattle in 2012!

Westercon, the West Coast Science Fantasy Conference, has been held annually since 1948 in the western half of North America as a less travel intensive alternative to Worldcon for west coast fans. Westercon 65 will run from July 5-8, 2012 and will be chaired by Bobby DuFault.

The rest of your Monday News is under the fold

Anime

• If you were not among those lucky enough to see the world premier of the Trigun movie Trigun Badlands Rumble at SakuraCon this April you are in luck. Anime News Network is reporting that distributor Funimation is planning on releasing it in theaters. No release date was given but it would almost certainly not be before sometime next year at the earliest.

• We mentioned the film Karigurashi No Arrietty (The Borrower Arrietty) back in February when the first teaser trailer came out and we’re mentioning it again now that a full trailer has been released. The movie was written and produced by Hayao Miyazaki, based on Mary Norton’s novel The Borrowers and will be directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi who worked as a key animator on Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away.
  

Boardgames

• Fans of Dominion may want to keep an eye out for Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, the new deck building game from publisher Gary Games. The game was designed by Magic: The Gathering pro-tour veterans Justin Gary, Rob Dougherty and Brian Kibler. The full rules haven’t been posted but there is some information on the Ascension Facebook page. The game is for 2-4 players and “features multiple factions, demons, heroes, and constructs from different planes in a battle to determine which player will ascend to godhood”. It will be debuting at Gen Con this August.

Comics

• DC has officially pulled the plug on their webcomic site Zuda Comics. The site stopped their popular webcomics competition in April and now the site will be closing down entirely. This appears to be a consequence of DC’s move to digital distribution through the iPad, iPhone and PSN. Issues of former Zuda titles High Moon and Bayou are already available on Comixology, and will soon be joined by Black Cherry Bombshells, Azure, Bottle of Awesome, Supertron, and Lily of the Valley, with each installment priced at 99 cents. DC Creative Services VP Ron Perezza made a post announcing the closure on the Zuda blog.