A photo found in the crate. Written on back was, “My new car at the beach.” From a diary also found in the box, I believe this photo to have been taken by Beau Jackson in early May just before the events in The Howl of the Werewolf.

Geeks rejoice!

I’m surprised Spider-Man and Super Woman didn’t come to the couple’s rescue when the intergalatic bounty hunter crashed the wedding.

In answer to questions posed by Ardeth Blood and a long-ago emailer, my favorite vampires:

Bodhi from Baldur’s Gate II is No. 9 on my vampire list.

1. Lucy Westenra. From the original Dracula and from my novel, The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire. She plays with her victims.

2. Dracula (Marvel comics version 1972-1979). This was the version that I grew up reading and my first introduction to vampires.

3. Dracula (1932 movie version). Classic.

4. Valeria. The vampire at the heart of The Traveling Vampire Show by the late Richard Laymon arrives late in the novel and after a long build up she does not disappoint.

5. Marcilla/Carmilla/Mircalla Karnstein. Ingrid Pitt plays a vampire who changes her name to live with and seduce her victims in The Vampire Lovers.

6. Spike. I’ve got to go with Blondy Bear over Angel. “You listen to me. I’ve been alive a bit longer than you and dead a lot longer than that. I’ve seen things you couldn’t imagine and done things I’d prefer you didn’t. I don’t exactly have a reputation for being a thinker. I follow my blood which doesn’t exactly rush in the direction of my brain so I make a lot of mistakes. A lot of wrong bloody calls. A hundred plus years and there’s only one thing I’ve ever been sure of. You.”

7. Dracula (1992 Dracula version). The best is when Gary Oldman is playing the old version of Dracula, entertaining Jonathan Harker at his castle in Transylvania. Amusing, dangerous, congenial, maniacal all in one and all believable as a vampire.

8. Dracula (original novel by Bram Stoker). The original vampire version of Dracula has got to be on the list, but his low ranking is due to the fact that the Count does a lot of fleeing from the hunters and spends more time than he should seducing the women. Nevertheless, he does feed on a baby and turns the wolves on the child’s mother when she arrives at the castle doors so he’s got that going for him. It was a lot of fun for me trying to figure out why Dracula traveled to London when I wrote my novel.

9. Bodhi. Possibly a surprise pick, she’s a vampire in the computer RPG Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn. She’s the sister of the game’s lead villain, who turned to vampirism after being punished with a curse to strip her of her elven immortality. She appears to enjoy the dark nature of vampires immensely and the character’s avatar moves with a speed and grace to be expected of a vampire.

10. Kurt Barlow (Salem’s Lot by Stephen King). He revels in evil. He doesn’t suffer remorse like many other modern fictional vampires. He wants to drink blood and kill. Plus he owns an antiques shop in a small New England town. How could he get more evil?

…and Attila the Hun. Link.

Frank Miller. And dark, as ever.

Miller arrived at the W a month and a half ago with a one-week reservation, but the L.A. fling is still going and he’s still living out of a suitcase filled with black clothes. The reason is that Miller, the most important comic book artist of the last 25 years, is enjoying his moment in the Hollywood sun. There was, of course, the record-breaking March box office of “300,” a lovingly faithful adaptation of Miller’s bloody 1998 graphic novel, but there’s also the two sequels to “Sin City” now in the pipeline and the Batman project now being filmed in London that borrows its title from Miller’s 1986 masterpiece, “The Dark Knight Returns.” “They finally got the title right,” Miller said with a pretend sneer. “I was wondering when that would happen.”

…Now there’s a sweet satisfaction in the fact that the new Hollywood approach is to hire fan-boy directors and show fawning respect for the source material. “Sin City’s” Robert Rodriguez even insisted on sharing director credits with Miller on those films (a maverick stand that cost Rodriguez his membership in the Directors Guild), and that led directly to a somewhat shocking development: Miller has now been tapped to write and direct his own film based on Will Eisner’s classic noir hero “The Spirit.” – Latte Times

“I intend to be extremely faithful to the heart and soul of the material, but it won’t be nostalgic. It will be much scarier than people expect,” Miller told Variety. – WillEisner.com

Paging Clark Kent. Clark Kent to the courtesy phone please. From the BBC:

Kryptonite is no longer just the stuff of fiction feared by caped superheroes.
A new mineral matching its unique chemistry – as described in the film Superman Returns – has been identified in a mine in Serbia.

snip

Researchers from mining group Rio Tinto discovered the unusual mineral and enlisted the help of Dr Stanley when they could not match it with anything known previously to science.

Once the London expert had unravelled the mineral’s chemical make-up, he was shocked to discover this formula was already referenced in literature – albeit fictional literature.

“Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral’s chemical formula – sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide – and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns.

in a “Spiritual” Bollywood….What a combo.

Throw Indian and American soldiers into a barren Afghanistan desert, toss a nuclear warhead into the hands of terrorists and you have an action-packed plot in the latest graphic novel to be released by Virgin Comics.

Created by graphic artists in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, the dark tale titled “Virulents” is the latest in a series of comic books produced in a year-old partnership between British billionaire Richard Branson, spiritual guru Deepak Chopra and Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur.

…Unlike last year’s serialized Virgin comics such as “The Sadhu,” “Devi” and “Snakewoman,” which are science fiction takeoffs on epic Indian good-versus-evil tales, the new release tells the whole story in one book and at first glance appears rooted in the present.The troops liberally swear in English and Hindi, and there are references to the war on terror, President Bush and even Bollywood beauty Aishwarya Rai.

Then comes the twist — the terrorists turn into demonic vampires. The new novel draws inspiration from an ancient Indian legend of a blood demon who produces clones every time a warrior slashes and spills his blood. – AP via PE.com

Stacie Ponder releases the director’s cut version of her stickfigure zombie epic They won’t stay dead.

Darpa project sounds like the origins of the Captain America comic book hero.

Mark Roth never expected his research to have military applications. He was a biochemist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, studying how chromosomes move during cell replication. Then, about a decade ago, his second daughter, Hannah Grace, died of heart failure at the age of 1. Her death sent him down a much stranger path. “I became interested in immortality,” he says. Roth knew that some animals hibernate — slowing their metabolisms until environmental conditions improve. He also knew that some cells can enter a kind of dormancy and then spring back to life — essentially, they go into suspended animation. Roth wanted to better understand this “metabolic flexibility.” He started testing various chemicals that slowed metabolism, like heavy water and tetrodotoxin (puffer fish poison, used in Haiti to turn people into zombies). Nothing worked. But then Roth found a loophole in one of nature’s seemingly absolute rules: Animals need oxygen. But some creatures, like nematodes, fruit flies, and zebra fish, don’t die if oxygen levels drop. Instead the critters suspend. Their hearts stop beating for up to 24 hours. They don’t breathe. And they don’t die. Wounds stop bleeding; nearly any injury becomes survivable, and the brain shuts down without damage. “If you were shot, this is exactly what you would want,” Roth says