Strange News From Comic Con

This past weekend was the San Diego Comic Convention. Arguably one of the bigger comic book conventions of the year. And yes, it has people showing up in costume (some of which really shouldn't be wearing costumes). It doesn't do a lot for the current impression people in this country ascribe to comic book geek culture (that's right, I'm talking about the Simpson's Comic Book Guy image), but it has gotten more mainstream. These days the convention is big news. It got coverage on NPR. It has Hollywood types showing up looking for something they can translate to the big screen. Comics are big business these days.

Now there was a lot of strange news coming out of the convention this year. Richard Donner (the director of Superman I and II) writing Superman. Nicolas Cage writing a comic book. In fact, there are a lot of Hollywood types putting out comics. Rumor has it that since comics are so frequently adapted to movies, this could be a way to get a project you want to do a film about prepped and green lighted by showcasing it in comic book form first. It's not uncommon for actors (like Seth Green's Freshmen and Rosari Dawson's Occult Crimes Taskforce) to take this route by showing their project in comic book form in hopes building a fan base and then getting it made into a movie where they would then either star or direct.

But even so, every now and then you hear news of some new comic and wonder "How is that going to work?". Well, remember that company that's going to produce "My Name Is Earl" as a comic book? They now have another title in the works. One that you may have heard of, but never really thought it was real. The tag line they introduced this new book with was "A great comic book, or the greatest comic book?" Now that question may seem familiar to those people that watch the Colbert Report (all three of you), and so it should. It turns out that Oni is going to be publishing a comic book version of Colbert's (what I thought was a fictional book) "Stephen Colbert's Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure". Yep, that's right, they're going to do a comic book about a fictional book portraying an over the top futuristic action hero who looks like Stephen Colbert.