The big convention weekend has come and gone and, as far as I can tell, Seattle survived! Attendence numbers for Sakura-Con and Norwescon were both impressive, though on very different scales. Sakura-Con topped out at over 19,000 and Norwescon had it’s largest convention ever with 3,600 attendees. We spent the whole weekend at Norwescon and had an amazing time which we will be talking about in some detail in this week’s podcast!

The Monday News is under the fold.

Books

• The British Science Fiction Association Award winners were announced this weekend at Eastercon. The winners are:
  • Best Novel: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
  • Best Short Fiction: ‘The Shipmaker’ by Aliette de Bodard
  • Best Art: Cover for Zoo City by Joey Hi-Fi
  • Best Non-Fiction: ‘Blogging the Hugos’ by Paul Kincaid

• The winner of the Philip K. Dick Award was also announced this weekend at our very own Norwescon. The award went to The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder, with a special citation to Harmony by Project Itoh. The award cerimony was live-streamed to the Internet for the first time ever this year and the response was good enough that it will most likely be streamed again next year.

• Last but not least in awards news, the Hugo nominees were announced this weekend at a joint ceremony held at Norwescon and Eastercon. The nominees include:
  Best Novel
  • Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
  • Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
  • The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
  • Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
  • The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

  Best Novella

  • “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2010)
  • The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
  • “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All New Tales, William Morrow)
  • “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s, September 2010)
  • “Troika” by Alastair Reynolds (Godlike Machines, Science Fiction Book Club)

  Best Novelette

  • “Eight Miles” by Sean McMullen (Analog, September 2010)
  • “The Emperor of Mars” by Allen M. Steele (Asimov’s, June 2010)
  • “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s, July 2010)
  • “Plus or Minus” by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s, December 2010)
  • “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” by Eric James Stone (Analog, September 2010)

  Best Short Story

  • “Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn (Lightspeed, June 2010)
  • “For Want of a Nail” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s, September 2010)
  • “Ponies” by Kij Johnson (Tor.com, November 17, 2010)
  • “The Things” by Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January 2010)

  Best Graphic Story

  • Fables: Witches, written by Bill Willingham; illustrated by Mark Buckingham (Vertigo)
  • Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
  • Grandville Mon Amour, by Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse)
  • Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel, written and illustrated by Howard Tayler; colors by Howard Tayler and Travis Walton (Hypernode)
  • The Unwritten, Volume 2: Inside Man, written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross (Vertigo)

  The full list of nominees is available at the Worldcon 69 Website.

• Amazon announced in a press release that “Library Lending”, a new feature launching later this year, will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the United States. Kindle Library Lending will be available for all generations of Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps. No specific release date was given.

Comics

• Greg Rucka announced in an audio interview with Stumptown Trade Review that he will be creating a new steampunk webcomic. Titled Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Ether the comic will feature art by Eisner Award winner Rick Burchett and will be a “steampunk, pirates, western thing” with airships, floating islands, gunslingers and sword fights. Rucka said that this was planned to be an ongoing series and that he hoped to launch in July.

Tabletop

• WizKids has announced the upcomming release of a series of Street Fighter Heroclix. The series will include a starter pack with Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Dhalsim, Blanka and Guile and will also have 21 additional Clix including M. Bison and E. Honda. , the starter set will retail for $19.99 and individual figures will be priced at $2.99. The Street Fighter set will, of course, be compatable with the entire HeroClix line and is scheduled to be in stores this August.

Video Games

• Sony’s PlayStation Network has been down since Wednesday due to “an external intrusion.” The netwrok was not crashed but was turned off by Sony in order to “conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of network services going forward” according to the announcement on the Playstation Blog. As of this morning the network remains down and the most recent entry posted by Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media Patrick Seybold says that “I don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time” as far as when service might return.

Game of Thrones premiered on HBO last night. You don’t have to worry about any spoilers here though. I can’t really talk about the show since, due to my ridiculous day job schedule Monday mornings, I was not able to stay up and watch it. What I can talk about is the genre snobbery in the mainstream press reviews.

Disdain for genre fiction is certainly nothing new. The Culture Show on the BBC recently aired a special titled ‘The Books We Really Read‘ that was so dismissive of genre fiction that it prompted a letter of protest signed by 85 science fiction, fantasy and horror authors ranging from Iain Banks to Michael Moorcock. Authors like Margaret Atwood have spent their entire careers fighting against having their work classified as “science-fiction” no doubt in some part because of the stigma attached to the label by critics. Given that, it isn’t surprising that some reviewers have been pretty contemptuous of the Game of Thrones premiere.

The New York Times review is particularly bad. The reviewer praises HBO for shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood and Big Love but goes on to say that “when the network ventures away from its instincts for real-world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga ‘True Blood,’ things start to feel cheap, and we feel as though we have been placed in the hands of cheaters.” So real world = good, vampires or fantasy setting = bad. Got it.

The review also criticizes Game of Thrones as being “boy fiction” to which HBO added sex and romance “as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise,” an accusation so egregious that George R. R. Martin took the rare step of responding to the critic

I am not going to get into it myself, except to say

1. if I am writing “boy fiction,” who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings?
   and

2. thank you, geek girls! I love you all.

The worst part of the review is that it fails to do any kind of actual review of the show itself. The reviewer talks about how expensive it was to produce, complains about the fantasy setting, explains how the show came to be on HBO, makes a couple of cracks about the use of invented languages, takes a swipe at D&D players and makes her laughable and vaguely sexist “boy fiction” comment all with virtually no discussion of what the show is actually about.

As I have mentioned before, in spite of the rising popularity of geekdom, the easiest way to prove your cool cred in the mass culture is still to make fun of the nerds and that is pretty much all the New York Times is doing with this review. Game of Thrones is something geeks would like, therefore it can’t be any good.

I will be watching Game of Thrones at the earliest opportunity and since I am both a boy and a D&D player I anticipate enjoying it thoroughly

The Monday News is under the fold.

Comics

• the 2011 Stumptown Comic Art Awards were presented at Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland over the weekend. The winners are:
  Best Artist: Emily Carroll, His Face All Red
  Best Writer: Aaron Renier, The Unsinkable Walker Bean
  Best Cartoonist: Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour
  Best Letterer: Johnny Ryan, Prison Pit #2
  Best Colorist: Emily Carroll, His Face All Red
  Best Publication Design: Michael DeForge, Spotting Deer
  Best Anthology: Studygroup 12 #4, edited by Zack Soto
  Best Small Press: I Want You #2 by Lisa Hanawalt
  Best New Talent: Michael DeForge
  Reader’s Choice: Pang, the Wandering Shaolin Monk by Ben Costa
  Director’s Choice: The Sixth Gun, by Brian Hurtt and Cullen Bunn, published by Oni Press

Manga

• Manga publisher Tokyopop has announced that they will be shutting down their North American publishing division as of May. Founder Stu Levy put a posative spin on the closure in a post on the Tokyopop website saying “our community has fought the good fight, and, as a result, the Manga Revolution has been won –manga has become a ubiquitous part of global pop culture.” Tokyopop’s film and television projects and European operations, including the German publishing program, will not be affected by the North American office closure.

• Anime News Network is reporting that Fruits Basket creator Natsuki Takaya will launch a manga series called Liselotte and Witch’s Forest starting this May. Takaya wrote Fruits Basket from 1998-2007 and the series was published in the U.S. by Tokyopop starting in 2004. The new series “centers around Liselotte — a girl who, until now, has lived a different life from others on the very easternmost tip of a country.”

MMO

• Developer Bigpoint announced in a press release that their browser-based Battlestar Galactica MMO has passed the one million subscriber mark since the open beta started in February. The game centers around space combat and allows players to fly missions either as Cylons or Humans and has story based PvE missions as well as strategic PvP battles for resources. BSG Online is free to play with optional microtransactions.

TV

• Farscape creator Rockne S. O’Bannon created something of a stir with a tweet on Saturday. The tweet, saying only “Great meeting at Syfy yesterday. New project. HUGE. New series. Very excited. Very, very excited” has created a lot of speculation about what the nature of this project is and how huge it could be. Farscape ran on *shudder* SyFy from 1999 – 2003, was plagued by changes in time slots and was finally cancelled by the network due to the show’s high production cost. We will be watching for further developments on this.

• We mentioned a few weeks ago the rumors started by SGU producer Joseph Mallozzi that if the ratings were good enough for the final episodes of the show that an SGU movie was not out of the question. Well those hopes have now been pretty definitively dashed by an announcement by executive producer Brad Wright at this weekend’s Creation Stargate convention in Vancouver. Airlock Alpha reports that Wright told an audience at the convention that financing for future Stargate projects had fallen through, partially because of the recent bankruptcy and financial restructuring at the show’s studio home MGM. *shudder* SyFy officially canceled the series in December and the last episode is scheduled to air in May.

- Kick off your week with a roundup of the geek news you may have missed -

Putting together the first news post after April Fools Day is always a challenge. There were some great stories out there this week but many of them turned out to be not-so-much true. One of my personal favorites was the story from Comic Mix about Warner Brothers lawyers handing out cease and desist orders to people with “unlicensed” tattoos of DC comics characters. This, in my mind, is how you do it right. The story was juuuuuust plausible enough that it really gave me pause. Think Geek also did a fine job again this year with their lightsaber popsicles and the Angry Birds pork rinds.

I’ve done my best to sort through and find some actual news stories but if something in here seems too good to be true it probably means someone’s joke slipped past.

Books

• The short list for the first Terry Pratchett Anywhere but Here, Anywhen but Now First Novel Prize has been announced. The six nominees are:
  • Postponing Armageddon by Adele Abbott
  • The Platinum Ticket by Dave Beynon
  • Half Sick of Shadows by David Logan
  • Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan
  • Lun by Andrew Salomon
  • The Coven at Callington by Shereen Vedam

  The winner will be chosen by Sir Terry Pratchett and four other judges and announced at a party to be held on May 31.

Comics

• IDW Publishing announced at Wondercon this weekend that they have acquired the rights to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and would be publishing new TMNT stories along with reprints of the original Eastman and Laird comics. Comic Book Resources is reporting that IDW’s take on the Turtles will be based on the original series but there was no comment on whether or not Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird themselves would be involved in the relaunch. The new series is scheduled to debut this Summer.

• According to an official press release, Too Much Coffee Man creator Shannon Wheeler has signed a three-book deal with BOOM! Studios. Wheeler will be publishing Too Much Coffee Man: Cutie Island & Other Stories and a follow up to I Thought You Would Be Funnier as well as an all new graphic novel titled Grandpa Won’t Wake Up under BOOM!’s BOOM! Town imprint. Grandpa Won’t Wake Up and Cutie Island & Other Stories are scheduled to be out this year and the I Thought You Would Be Funnier follow up will be out in Spring 2012.

Movies

• Warner Brothers released four minutes of footage from Green Lantern into the wild. This is a “condensed version” of the footage that was a huge hit at Wondercon. Enjoy!
  

Tabletop

• Twilight Creations’ Deadlands boardgame may finally make it in to stores. From their website;
  

  After many delays we are happy to announce that Deadlands: Invasion of Slaughter Gulch (affectionately known as DL2) is at the printers. We expect to have it sometime in late May. We think you will find that it was worth the wait.

  The game, which has been listed as “coming soon” since 2009, has players vying for control of a frontier town and the supply of “ghost rock” in the surrounding area.

TV

• The BBC continues to crank up the hype for the new season of Dr. Who with a new extended trailer that was released into the wild on Friday. Enjoy!
  

- Kick off your week with a roundup of the geek news you may have missed -

One last bit of Emerald City ComiCon news to start off. We got word on attendance numbers from the man himself, Jim Demonakos the founder and organizer of ECCC. He tells us that 32,000 people were at the convention center over the course of the weekend versus 20,000 last year. To put that in a little broader context, San Diego reported 130,000 attendees last year but in my book being smaller than San Diego is not at all a bad thing.

The Monday News is under the fold

Comics

• Stumptown Comics Fest has announced the final list of 2011 nominees for the Stumptown Comic Arts Awards and you get to decide the winners! The nominees include:
  Best Artist:
  • Emily Carroll – His Face All Read
  • Roman Muradov – Etc and A Cave
  • Stuart Immonen – Moving Pictures
  • Brian Hurtt – The Sixth Gun
  • Brecht Evans – Night Animals

  Best Writer:

  • Carla Speed McNeil – Finder: Voice
  • Cullen Bunn – The Sixth Gun
  • Greg Rucka – Stumptown
  • Aaron Renier – The Unsinkable Walker Bean
  • Ben Marra – Benjamin Marra’s The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Down (A Work of Satire and Fiction)

  Best Letter:

  • Johnny Ryan – Prison Pit Vol. 2
  • Madeline Flores – The Girl and the Gorilla
  • Carla Speed McNeil – Finder: Voice
  • Aaron Renier – The Unsinkable Walker Bean
  • Brittney Sabo – Francis Sharp in the Grip of the Uncanny, Vol. 1

  Best Colorist:

  • Brecht Evans – Night Animals
  • Emily Carroll – His Face All Read
  • Alec Longstreth – The Unsinkable Walker Bean
  • Ben Costa – Pang: The Wandering Shaolin Monk
  • Sarah Glidden – How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less

  Best New Talent:

  • Michael DeForge
  • Adam Hines
  • Emi Lenox
  • Sarah Oleksyk
  • Julia Gfrörer

  Reader’s Choice:

  Voters are asked to list up to three of their favorite comics from April 2010 to April 2011. Any graphic novel, trade paper back collection, single issue or ongoing series, small press or online – whatever title has the most votes as determined by the readers will win this special prize.

  To vote in this year’s awards visit stumptowncomics.com/awards_ballot. After voting, you will receive an email which must be confirmed in order for your vote to be counted. Winners will be announced at the Stumptown Comics Fest, the largest creator-focused comics convention in the Pacific Northwest, which will be held April 16-17 at the Oregon Convention Center.

• The Stumptown Award nominated writer Greg Rucka is returning to Marvel with a new ongoing Punisher series. The announcement was made at the Marvel’s Cup O’ Joe panel at C2E2 this weekend. Rucka said that he will be taking a “back to basics” approach on the book;
  

  There is a baseline that is very clear in this character, in my opinion, and I have no urge to f*ck with that at all. In all sincerity. It’s working, it’s dynamite for the character, it defines him well — I’m not going to go in there and mess with that, no way.

  Newsarama is reporting that the series will have art by Marco Checchetto of Squadron Supreme fame and will debut in August.

Manga

• Publisher Kodansha USA announced in a press release that it will be reprinting the entire run of Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon. In addition to “deluxe editions” of the series, which has been out of print since 2005, they will be releasing the two-volume prequel series Codename: Sailor V which has never been published in the United States. The original 18 volumes have been condensed into 12 volumes covering the main storyline, and two volumes dedicated to short stories. They will be released bi-monthly starting in September of this year.

Movies

• Warner Brothers has released a behind-the-scenes teaser video for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 into the wild. Enjoy!
  

Tabletop

• Atlas Games has announced Cthulhu Gloom, the newest addition to their line of “transparent” card games. Cthulhu Gloom can be played either as a stand alone game or as an expansion for the basic Gloom card game. It continues with the basic Gloom mechanic of having players try and inflict the most suffering on the members families they control before engineering their tragic deaths and will also add two new mechanics, Story cards and Transformation cards. Cthulhu Gloom was designed by Keith Baker and will be in stores this August.

TV

• The first picture of actress Adrianne Palicki in her role as Wonder Woman for the new NBC series has been making the rounds (click the thumbnail for full size). Reviews have been mixed from fans and other interested parties. On the positive side, original TV Wonder Woman Lynda Carter told E Online that she liked the new costume;
  

  ‘I think she looks fabulous,’ said Carter, who originated the role in the classic (and oh-so-campy!) series in the mid-’70s. ‘It’s a new look and, jeez, her body looks fantastic.’

  On the negative side we have Fox News. Fox responded to the photo by republishing an article from July about the Jim Lee-designed costume from the Wonder Woman comics on which the new TV costume is based. In the article they complain that Wonder Woman has “been stripped of her patriotism” with the removal of the stars-and-stripes motif of the original costume. I would make the attempt explain to the Fox writers that Wonder Woman is not actually an American but I’m afraid if I did they would start calling for her to be deported.

• Good news for fans of Being Human. Both the BBC and *shudder* Syfy have announced new seasons for their respective incarnations of the series, a fourth for the BBC and a second for *shudder* Syfy. Both versions of the show will begin airing new episodes next year.

Finishing off our ECCC coverage this week, we have more interviews recorded on Saturday and Sunday at the con. In this episode we talk with writer Eric Trautmann, webcomic creators Neal Bailey, Alina Pete, and Rebecca Hicks, artist Echo Chernik, we catch up with Creator’s Edge editor-in-chief Chuck Messinger and Ed Ward the founder and operator of the Paper Windows comic subscription service. We were also lucky enough to sit down with William F. Nolan, author of Logans Run, among many other things, who was celebrating his 83rd birthday at Emerald City!

Beyond our Emerald City coverage, we also talk with with bestselling authors Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson about their new book Hellhole and get the rundown on the upcomming Gamestorm 13 with Outreach Coordinator Jason.

It’s a long show this week but we’re cramming in enough goodness to keep you going as we return to our bi-weekly format.

Our Geek Week

• Listening to the audiobook of Cat’s Claw by Amber Benson
• Played Crush the Castle
• Read River Marked by Patricia Briggs
• Reading Journal of a UFO Investigator by David Halperin
• Watching Face Off on SyFy

Emerald City ComiCon 2011

• Eric Trautmann (Interview starts at 11:30)



• Neal Bailey creator of Cura Te Ipsum (Interview starts at 17:06)



• Alina Pete creator of Weregeek and Moose Head Stew (Interview starts at 22:19)



• Echo Chernik (Interview starts at 26:11)



• Rebecca Hicks creator of Little Vampires (Interview starts at 29:15)



• William F. Nolan (Interview starts at 35:19)



• Chuck Messinger founder of Creators Edge Press (Interview starts at 52:02)



• Ed Ward founder and operator of Paper Windows (Interview starts at 55:48)

Geekly Extras

• Gamestorm 13 (Interview starts at 59:06)



• Hellhole by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (Interview starts at 1:05:45)

CONTEST!

Win a Pile o’ Books!

We have a pile of books courtesy of Tor and Ace and we want to give them to YOU!

The books include:

• River Marked by Patricia Briggs
• Glen Cook’s third book in the Instumentalities of the Night series Surrender to the Will of the Night
• The Bird of the River by Kage Baker
• SIGNED COPIES of Paul of Dune and the brand new book Hellhole by Brian Herbert & Kevin J Anderson!

This contest starts today and we’ll be picking the winner during our show on April 14. We will ship the books to you via USPS.

“How do I enter?”
Please register / log in to our website, and leave a comment on THIS POST. You can just say “hi” or whatever! One entry per person please, we’ll delete any multiple or offensive posts. Make sure you use a valid e-mail address when you register so we can contact you if you win!

“How will you randomly pick someone?”
We have D&D dice of all shapes and sizes, even a 100 sider! We’ll roll and see who wins!

News

• Epic Game Day 2 is April 30!
• First Cast Photo from Ron Moore’s 17th Precinct: It’s a BSG reunion!
• Syfy Renews ‘Face Off’ For Second Season
• HBO Issues First Two Episode Descriptions For GAME OF THRONES!!

Music

Music this week was ‘Avatard’ and ‘Grimm’s Lament’ by H2Awesome from their forthcoming album. Keep an eye on their website for the official release date!

Next show: Episode #95 on March 31st – Spring and Summer Movies: From Suckerpunch to Green Lantern!

Seattle Geekly by http://www.seattle-geekly.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The convention season kicked off this past weekend with an amazing Emerald City ComiCon. This is the first year that Emerald City went for three days and we took full advantage of that by running around like maniacs and talking to anyone who would sit still for us.

In this week’s show we have interviews with some familiar names and some new ones including Dark Horse Comics Managing Editor Scott Allie, writers Brandon Jerwa and Matt Sturges, webcomic creators Jeff Schuetze of Jefbot and Curt Franklin and Chris Haley from Let’s Be Friends Again plus a whole bunch more.

We also talk about our experience moderating the Buffy the Vampire Slayer panel at ECCC with Nicholas “Xander” Brendon, James “Spike” Marsters and Clare “Glory” Kramer plus the weekly geek news.

Our Geek Week

• Listened to the audiobook of Death’s Daughter by Amber Benson
• Completed the move to the all new Seattle Geekly HQ!

Emerald City ComiCon 2011

• Project London (Interview starts at 07:30 in the podcast)



• Spokane Comic Con‘s Nate O’Brien (Interview at 12:13)



• Scott Allie, Managing Editor of Dark Horse Comics (Interview at 14:52)



• Jeff Schuetze, creator of Jefbot (Interview at 26:46)



• Curt Franklin and Chris Haley, creators of Let’s Be Friends Again (Interview starts at 33:37)



• Brandon Jerwa, writer of Hack Slash/Eva: Monster’s Ball among many others (Interview starts at 39:43)



• Matt Sturges, writer of Jack of Fables among others (Interview at 46:23)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer panel


Thanks to Heath for posting the video!

Stay tuned next week for the other half of our Emerald City coverage!

News

• Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 tapped for XBLA, PSN, PC this summer
• DC Comics postpones Batwoman debut again
• Nintendo embarks on four-city 3DS demo tour

Music

Music this week was ‘D.I.Y.’ by Adam WarRock and ‘Crogan’s Vengeance’ by Tribe One off the Oni Press Mixtape which is available as a FREE DOWNLOAD from Adam WarRock‘s website.

Next show: Episode #94 on March 17 will be our second ECCC wrapup show. We have more interviews from ECCC attendees including Rebecca Hicks, Creator’s Edge Comics and legendary author William F Nolan writer of Logan’s run.

Seattle Geekly by http://www.seattle-geekly.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

We are tremendously excited about Emerald City ComiCon this year. Not only is this the first year that the con will be three days, but there is a great roster of amazing guests and events. This week we preview some of what will be going on at ECCC. First up we talked to three of the memebers of geek rock band H2Awesome who will be playing along with Adam WarRock and Kirby Krackle at Kracklefest this Saturday and we follow that up with interviews with Star Trek historian Larry Nemecek and Felicia Day and Amy Okuda from The Guild!

All that plus the weekly geek news.

Our Geek Week

• Listened to the audiobook of Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber
• Reading Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
• Read River of Gods by Ian McDonald
• Watched RED (2010) on Blu-ray
• Watched Let Me In (2010) on Blu-ray
• Watched the Oscars

Emerald City Madness!

• H2Awesome



• Larry Nemecek



• Felicia Day and Amy Okuda from The Guild (among other things)

Don’t forget that Saturday morning is the Seattle Geekly meetup at Emerald City! We’ll be meeting outside the coffee shop on the first floor of the convention center. We’l have prizes and maybe even a couple of special guests!

News

• Red Dead Redemption, Minecraft clean up at GDC Awards
• Valve Unveils Steam Guard
• Bone: 20th Anniversary Full Color One Volume debuts in San Diego

Music

Music this week was ‘Why So Serious’ by H2Awesome off their forthcoming album. If you hurry you may be able to still get tickets to see H2Awesome play live at Kracklefest this Saturday! You also heard The Guild’s ‘Do you Wanna Date my Avatar‘ and ‘Tonight I’m Frakking You’ from Break.com

Next show: Episode #93 on March 10 and it will be the first of two weekly episodes of interviews from Emerald City ComiCon. Stay Tuned to find out who we’ll be talking to!

Seattle Geekly by http://www.seattle-geekly.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Before we get in to the news I have a short rant about death in comic books.

Even non-comics readers will probably have heard about the death of Johnny Storm, The Human Torch, in a recent issue of The Fantastic Four. The story broke into the mainstream press, as I’m sure Marvel had hoped it would, generating considerable buzz for the event. The resulting spike in sales of the Fantastic Four was apparently enough that it prompted David Gabriel, Senior Vice President of Sales at Marvel Comics who spoke at the ComicsPRO trade meeting in Dallas this weekend, to announce that Marvel will kill a main character every quarter adding, according to one report, “this is not a joke”. Since word of this leaked Gabriel has backed away from the statement, saying “It’s partially true and said as a humorous response to the question ‘What can you do to bring more outside folks into comic shops?’ The actual point made was that these stories should not be seen as merely death stories, but more important is the aftermath.”

No one I have talked to is actually expecting Johnny Storm to stay dead. By this point everyone knows that major characters never stay dead in comics. Jean Grey/Phoenix, Batman, Superman and Captain America all had heavily hyped deaths and all have since returned. The phenomenon is so well known that there is even a Wikipedia entry for “Comic Book Death“. Seattle Geekly’s resident comic book expert Ed has pointed out that even the timing of the Human Torch’s death gives a hint as to when he will return. He dies in issue #587, leaving time for a one year/12 issue “aftermath” storyline before his triumphant return in Fantastic Four #600.

The death of a hero has become a cliché and this is what I find most troubling about David Gabriel’s comment and even his explanation – clichés do not make for good storytelling. Marketing gimmicks run amok were a big part of what nearly killed the comics industry in the 90s. Sales were driven by an artificially created collector market based on nothing but hype. Once people realized that not only were the ultra rare foil variant covers not really valuable collectables, but there was also no story to speak of inside, the bubble burst. An endless cycle of The Death of [Character X], The Aftermath of [Character X]‘s Death and The Amazing Return of [Character X] stories would have the same effect. It wouldn’t take long at all before those stories just weren’t worth reading and, with the demise of the collector market, if comics aren’t worth reading, they aren’t worth buying.

Marvel was once known as “The House of Ideas” and that is what generates sustainable readership. Good ideas, good writing and good art. I really hope someone on the creative side of Marvel remembers that before the marketing side drives them in to another hole.

The Monday News is under the fold.

MMO

• Developer ArenaNet quietly announced through an update to the FAQs that closed alpha and beta testing on Guild Wars 2 will begin sometime this year. ArenaNet posters on the GuildWars2guru forums were quick to point out that the release date for the game is the same as it has always been – “when the game is ready” – but this is still an encouraging sign.

Movies

• This Wednesday is Film and Media Day in Santa Fe, New Mexico. You may well ask why you should care, but if you scroll down the list of events on the website you will notice that one of them is an open casting call “in which ALL of New Mexico’s working Casting Directors and SAG franchised Talent Agents and/or their representatives will be present” including those for The Avengers. This could be your chance to be an extra in a crowd scene directed by Joss Whedon!

Music

• A few of the people behind RhymeTorrents, the seminal early nerdcore community, have set out to construct a new community, Nerdcore Now, and they are celebrating with the release of a compilation album featuring Ultraklystron, Beefy, Death*Star, and Adam Warrock among many others. The actual Nerdcore Now site is currently down while it gets moved to new servers but the album is available to download at NerdcoreHipHop.com and Hipster Please has an excellent review of the album plus a little reminiscence about the significance of RhymeTorrents in the history of nerdcore.

• The Civilization franchise has another feather to put in it’s cap. This weekend, the Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists was awarded to ‘Baba Yetu’ composed by Christopher Tin. In addition to being on Tin’s album Calling All Dawns the song was used as the theme for Civilization IV in 2005 making it the fist game ever to receive a Grammy. Calling All Dawns was also nominated and won for Best Crossover Classical Album.

TV

• Good news for BSG fans: filming has now officially begun on the pilot for Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome. Straight from the press release:
  

  Production has begun in Vancouver on Syfy’s highly anticipated 2-hour pilot, Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, the all-new chapter in the Battlestar Galactica saga. Universal Cable Productions will produce the event with Syfy utilizing cutting edge CGI and virtual technology.

  Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome takes place in the 10th year of the first Cylon war. As the battle between humans and their creation, the sentient robotic Cylons, rages across the 12 colonial worlds, a young, talented fighter pilot, William Adama (Luke Pasqualino), finds himself assigned to one of the most powerful Battlestars in the Colonial fleet: the Galactica. Full of ambition and in pursuit of the intense action that the Cylon war promises, Adama quickly find himself at odds with Coker (Ben Cotton), the battle-weary officer to whom he reports.

  Joining Pasqualino and Cotton in the cast is Lili Bordan, who will play Dr. Beka Kelly, a Ph.D. who worked for Graystone Industries that created the Cylon robots.

Apparently there was some kind of sporting event going on in between the new movie trailers that came out yesterday. If you missed it, we got new trailers for Thor, Captain America and Cowboys vs Aliens all of which look moderately promising!

Those trailers and the rest of the Monday News are under the fold

Superbowl Movie Spots

Comics

• Passes for San Diego Comic Con went on sale this Saturday at 9 am. Four day passes were sold out within a matter of hours and single day passes quickly followed. The convention was entirely sold out by 6pm, though additional passes may become available as cancellations are processed. The online ticket buying system was not exactly capable of handling the volume of customers with many people able only to get an “over capacity” error screen. The problems were so pervasive that San Francisco comic store Isotope has created a commemorative “Fail Frog” button for those that weren’t able to get through. The comic below also sums up many people’s experience with the system.
  

• Bone creator Jeff Smith is apparently working on a superman project for DC. Smith posted this sketch of Superman (which you can click to enlarge) on his blog , saying only that it was “for an upcoming project.” He has already done some fine work on DC owned characters, namely Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil which featured Captain Marvel. No further details of the Superman project were available, but it will be one to keep an eye out for.

MMO

• Blizzard has announced the dates and location for BlizzCon 2011. This year’s BlizzCon will be held at the Anaheim Convention Center on October 21-22. The press release promises that attendees will enjoy “Hands-on play time with the latest versions of Blizzard Entertainment games, discussion panels with Blizzard Entertainment developers, competitive and casual tournaments for players to showcase their talents, community contests with great prizes [and] commemorative merchandise based on Blizzard Entertainment’s game universes” but offers no specific details regarding announcements or guests that will be in attendance.

Video Games

• Game Informer is reporting some good news for Fallout: New Vegas players on the PC and PS3. Dead Money, the first major downloadable expansion for Fallout New Vegas, will be arriving on the PS3 and PC later this month after being out for the XBox 360 since December. In further good news, Bethesda has announced that all future DLC packs will be made available simultaneously on all platforms.

A lot of people out there loved AMC’s The Walking Dead and that has brought some new readers to the world of comics. This week we talk with our go-to comic book expert Ed about a few other titles that would be good both for people who aren’t regular comics readers and also for comic fans that are looking for something a little different.

Also this week, Shannon watches a double feature Dared Movie and the weekly geek news.

Our Geek Week

• Read Dust and Chill by Elizabeth Bear
• Re-reading some H.P. Lovecraft
• Went to the Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival

Comics Madness!

Thanks to Ed for lending his expertise to this weeks show! Here are a few of the titles we discussed:

• American Vampire



• iZombie



• Sweet Tooth



• Unwritten



• Buffy the Vampire Slayer



• Serenity: The Shepherd’s Tale



• Jericho



• Dollhouse



• Locke & Key



• Doorways



• Chew

Dare Shannon to Watch a Bad Movie

This week’s special Dared Movie Double Feature was The Expendables (2010) and The A-Team

If you want to dare Shannon to watch a bad movie, e-mail us at seattlegeekly@gmail.com or call us at (206)201-2352. Check our Dared Movies Page to see what is on the list and what Shannon has already watched.

News

• Seattle Geekly News!
  • If you’re going to be at Emerald City ComiCon next month be sure and come see us as we try and maintain our composure while interviewing James “Spike” Marsters, Nicholas “Xander” Brendon and Clare “Glory” Kramer on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer panel! We’d love to see some friendly faces in the audience!
  • In an attempt to maintain our sanity as well as our relationships with firends and family we are going to be swiching to a bi-weekly format for the Seattle Geekly podcast. We love doing the show and the response from you, the listeners, has been overwhelming but doing one show a week is a TON of work and is becoming a bit more than we can handle on our own. The website will still be full of new goodness every week including the Monday News, Events to Watch Out For and Wednesday Reviews and we will almost certainly have extra shows for coverage of major conventions like PAX and Emerald City. We hope you all understand and will stick with us!
• FOX’s Locke & Key pilot is among an encouragingly large slate of potential new geeky TV shows on the horizon
• Castle Crashers Pink Knight Fights for Breast Cancer Research
• Marvel Comics on Chrome

Music

Music this week was ‘Fallout State of Mind’ by Adam WarRock, one of the more recent Tracklog songs available as a free download on his website. You can also buy his album The War for Infinity on Bandcamp and don’t forget to pick up your tickets to Kracklefest featuring Adam WarRock, H2Awesome and Kirby Krackle!

Next Show: Episode #91 on February 17, 2011. This will either be another installment of Geek Music or a giant book review/author show. Stay tuned!

Seattle Geekly by http://www.seattle-geekly.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.