Monday News Roundup 08/30

Posted by Matt at 11:02 am Geek Speak

Aug 302010

Saturday was the first International Read Comics in Public day and we happily participated. There is a Read Comics in Public Flickr pool that has collected pictures from people across the country enjoying comics in a wide variety of locations.

The comics we were reading were Chew vol. 2 by John Layman and Rob Guillory and Atomic Robo vol. 1 by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener. Alert listeners will have heard us talk about Chew in the past, you can hear our interview with writer John Layman in Episode #63 and keep reading under the fold for some big news regarding Chew and the Harvey Awards results.

Atomic Robo, written by Brian Clevinger with art by Scott Wegener, is an ongoing series that tells the story of a robot built in the 1920s by Nikola Tesla. Atomic Robo had adventures through the 20th century and into the 21st along with his “action scientists”. The stories are part League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, part Hellboy and part Indiana Jones. The books were written with the goal of putting “the fun, the adventure, and the optimism of the pulp era back into today’s comics” and the creators accomplished that goal handily. The cover of the collection I read, which shows Atomic Robo getting ready to hit a brain-in-a-jar with a World War II era nuclear bomb, gives a fair indication of the style of the book. The writing is clever and genuinely funny and the art has a very clean almost cartoon-y look that I really enjoyed. There are three volumes out now and volume four is coming next week. I highly recommend grabbing at least the first collection and I will certainly be picking up the others soon. It also looks like there is an Atomic Robo animated short in the works, the first trailer for which just hit the web. Enjoy!

The rest of your Monday news is under the fold.

Books

The nominees for the World Fantasy Awards for works published in 2009 have been announced. Nominees include:
Locus Online has the full list of nominees. The awards will be presented at the World Fantasy Convention this October.

Comics

The papers of anti-comics crusader Fredric Wertham have been opened to the public by the Library of Congress. Fredric Wertham was a psychiatrist and wrote Seduction of the Innocent in 1954 laying out his case against not only the graphic crime comics of the time, but also mainstream super hero comics as well. The book kicked off a wave of anti-comics hysteria which culminated in the formation of the Comics Code Authority. The irony of Dr. Wertham’s book is that comics mentioned in Seduction of the Innocent are now highly prized by collectors and routinely bring higher prices than other comics not mentioned in the book. The full text of Seduction of the Innocent is available online.

The Harvey Award winners were announced at Baltimore Comic Con this weekend. The winners are:
The full list of winners is available through Comic Mix

TV

Digital Spy is among the many sites reporting that the sixth series of Doctor Who will be broadcast in two parts. Lead writer and executive producer Steven Moffat made the announcement at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Sunday. The latest series will start in Spring 2011 and return in the Autumn and will include, among other things, an episode written by Neil Gaiman.

Genre TV did not fare particularly well in the Emmys this year. The good news is that the competition from mainstream comedy and drama shows was actually pretty good and most of the shows that did win awards are actually decent, if not particularly geeky. Emmy winners of interest to the geek set included Jim Parsons, Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, who won for Lead Actor in a Comedy and that was pretty much it on the creative side. The technical Emmys were somewhat kinder to genre shows, recognizing Lost for Single-camera Picture Editing for a Drama Series, FlashForward for Stunt Coordination and the collaborative animation collage project Star Wars: Uncut which won for Creative Achievement in Interactive Media—Fiction. The full list of winners is available on the official Emmys site.

Video Games

Rockstar Games has announced a release date and additional content for the latest DLC for Red Dead Redemption. Straight from Rockstar:

The Liars and Cheats Pack will contain a great range of new highly-requested features to expand the Free Roam world including Multiplayer Poker and Liar’s Dice, as well as a brand new Competitive Multiplayer gameplay mode. The Liars and Cheats Pack will also include the content previously announced as the Free Roam Pack. The Free Roam Pack was originally planned as a free download, but due to the platform networks’ restrictions on numbers of free packs we can give away, we have instead added it to The Liars & Cheats Pack as one Free Roam release boasting the following features and more:

Multiplayer Poker and Liars’ Dice Games
One of the most fan-requested features comes to multiplayer.

Multiplayer Horse Races
Ride out against your friends and foes online – with mounted combat guns blazing.

The Explosive Rifle
An devastatingly destructive new weapon with its own new single-player and multiplayer challenges.

7 New Gang Hideouts
Posse up and take on the new Hideouts together to level up quickly.

4 New Hunting Grounds
New Hunting Grounds are now visible on the map for all to see, with some of the most action-packed wildlife hunting yet.

Stronghold Competitive Multiplayer Mode
Teams take turns in attack and defense in multi-tiered Competitive games.

Posse Scoring and Leaderboards
Compare stats with other posses and compete to see who are the kings of the Free Roam frontier.

Plus, 15 additional multiplayer characters from the Red Dead Redemption storyline are being made available as multiplayer characters, and more all-new Achievements and Trophies.

Liars & Cheats will be available September 21 for $9.99 on Playstation Network or 800 Microsoft Points on Xbox Live.