40 Classic Books Every Horror Buff Should Read

With its visceral, primal, and psychological imagery, horror-themed media attracts just as many slavish devotees as it does squeamish detractors, and has for centuries. Though attitudes change across time, culture, and geography (and, along with them, narrative devices), horror’s core always remains the same. The most successful examples channel internal and external anxieties — many of them universal — and kick them right back to their readers with nauseating accuracy. Read more …

Comic-Con Fans Dig Zombieland’s Menu of Flesh, Twinkies and Bill Murray

Woody Harrelson, roller coaster massacres and an epic quest to find the last Twinkie on earth… If the deafening roar of approval from Comic-Con is any indication, Zombieland is shaping up to be a bloody, hilarious, horrifying hit.

Back in June, FirstShowing started spreading the good word about the debut of Sony’s first Zombieland trailer, which they called a “must-see” and lavished with anticipatory praise. “This kind of looks like if Adventureland and Shaun of the Dead and I Am Legend were mixed together into one undead comedic masterpiece. Not only does it look like it has a whole lot of great zombie kills in it, but it looks like it might have a great little plot involving Emma Stone. Does she fall in love with Jesse Eisenberg? Does that really matter? Whatever the case, I’m loving this trailer, I can’t wait to see it. Killing zombies for fun?! Is there anything better?!”

Horror enthusiasts far and wide echoed his sentiments, so you can imagine the frenzy that ensued when director Ruben Fleischer and his stars presented a new red-band trailer for the movie and some footage from the flick to the nerds at Comic-Con. Zombie-tastic!

In his report from the road, Alex Phan of the Los Angeles Times’ Movie Blog proclaimed Zombieland is ‘keep[ing] the… genre alive,” and went on to praise its “witty script” and cast, which includes Harrelson, up-and-comer Jesse Eisenberg and powerhouse child actor Abigail Breslin. Slashfilm’s Russ Fischer, also at Comic-Con, chimed in breathlessly on the subject of Breslin’s Oscar nomination at the age of ten for Little Miss Sunshine and touted Zombieland’s red-band trailer, calling it “fantastic, full of slo-mo zombie kills (this is a great way to use speed ramping) and some great humor from Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson.” io9 went so far as to accord Zombieland the number two slot on its “Who Won Comic Con’s Buzz War?” list, explaining, “Another sleeper project, and one that features the overexposed undead, Zombieland crawled out of a buzz grave at Comic Con. This movie was just so gleeful and so outrageously gonzo with its mayhem, and the panel was full of great quotable soundbites.” Read more …

A Distant Soil a Science Fiction / Fantasy Comic Book , Poster, and Video San Diego Comic Con ‘08: Colleen Doran

A Distant Soil is a science fiction/fantasy comic book series written and illustrated by Colleen Doran, and is the work for which she is best known.

The story, which Doran created at the age of twelve, centers on a young girl who is born heir to an alien religious dynasty, and explores issues of politics, gender identity, and tolerance.

Its strong characterization and elegant art style has inspired the Young American Library Association to profile the book in their quarterly journal, and it has been nominated for the Spectrum Award for Best Science Fiction in the Other category in 2001.

A Distant Soil was originally published by Wendy and Richard Pini’s WaRP Graphics, but Doran subsequently left the company due to an acrimonious dispute with Richard Pini, whom she alleged was attempting to claim copyright on her work.

The WaRP version of the story was never reprinted, despite its unusual all-pencil style, although in one collected volume of the new series Doran did reprint the short Distant Soil story “R & R” that had appeared in a WaRP anthology. Read more …

EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW: Bill Hader & Seth Meyers Of ‘SNL’ Take On ‘Spider-Man: The Short Halloween’

Back in February, we brought you the news of an upcoming collaboration between Marvel Comics and “Saturday Night Live” regulars Bill Hader and Seth Meyers, titled “Spider-Man: The Short Halloween.” The single-issue story promised to take a tongue-in-cheek look at the misadventures of a costumed party-goer mistaken for the real wallcrawler and kidnapped by Spider-Man’s foes.

Along with an original story by the comics-savvy “SNL” duo, “The Short Halloween” features art by Kevin Maguire — the man who helped put the “funny” back in funnybooks during the late ’80s alongside another comedic duo, “Justice League” writers Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis.

To get the scoop on “The Short Halloween,” I spoke to Marvel’s go-to guy for all things webslinger, Spider-Man group editor Stephen Wacker. Read on for an exclusive, 10-page preview of “Spider-Man: The Short Halloween” (sans lettering), as well as all the details from our conversation about Marvel’s upcoming “SNL” team-up. Read more …

A Short Preview of Short Halloween

MTV’s Splash Page has a preview up of Spider-Man: The Short Halloween, the one-shot written by Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader and Seth Meyers and drawn by Kevin Maguire.

There’s no dialogue, so it’s hard to say how the pair’s first outing as comic writers will end up, but I could stare at Maguire’s art all day. Read more …

Graphics Interchange Format: Horror Gift for Halloween

Alternatives: Portable Network Graphics (PNG) was designed as a replacement for the GIF format in order to avoid infringement of Unisys’ patent on the LZW compression technique. PNG offers better compression and more features than GIF. The format is more suitable than GIF in instances where true-color imaging, alpha transparency, or a lossless data format are required. MNG was originally developed as a PNG-based solution for animations, but has not been widely adopted. The GIF format is still preferred for animation over PNG, although true Animated Portable Network Graphics are under development by Mozilla and is supported in Firefox 3. Read more …

Graphics Interchange Format: Gift Animated Joker Applauds

PNG image files are generally smaller than GIF files of the same image quality, due to the more efficient compression techniques used in PNG encoding. PNG files can indeed be much larger than GIF files in situations where a GIF and a PNG file were created from a high-quality master image, as PNG is capable of storing more color depth and transparency information than GIF. However, for identical 8-bit (or lower) image data, PNG-format image files are almost always smaller than the equivalent GIF. Misinformation about PNG efficiency can generally be traced back to poor PNG support in older versions of some image manipulation programs, (for example Adobe Photoshop did not optimize PNGs for reduced color palettes by default). Read more …