Day: April 15, 2007

I feel like there’s some kind of weird Prison Break riff to be made off of this elaborate Marvel comics tattoo, but unfortunately the only comics prison I can think of offhand is Arkham Asylum^*, and that’s DC, not Marvel.

Anyway, link via Progrssive Ruin.

* Well, okay, there’s also the Phantom Zone, I guess, but that’s really no better, now is it?

Well this is interesting:

Having read The Three Stigmata, I’m having a tough time imagining it as a film, much less one informed by Lennon’s absurdist tendencies. Then again, Blade Runner bears only a passing resemblance to Dick’s original novel — for better and for worse; they’re like mirror-universe versions of one other. Even the best translations of Dick’s stories to the screen — here I’m thinking of Minority Report — usually transform into big action movies along the way^*. I think this goes a long way to explaining Dick’s continued appeal in Hollywood. It’s not so much the weird and paranoiac worldview, or its resonance with modern audiences, as it is the simple framework on which directors and screenwriters can stretch pretty shots of stuff blowed up real good.

* I haven’t seen A Scanner Darkly yet. I suspect that, if it is an exception, it’s just the one that proves the rule.

I don’t know that “heliumpunk” qualifies necessarily as a new subgenre, but it is an interesting idea. As I understand it, it’s essentially a more realistic twist on steampunk, not simply tossing outmoded forms of technology into a futuristic setting, but envisioning a future in which those forms could theoretically come back into fashion:

Via Warren Ellis.

It occurs to me that I haven’t posted the actual contents of Kaleidotrope‘s second issue. So here, for just $4 — all of which, I think I can safely say, will wind up in my contributors’ hands — is what you’ll get:

Plus an in-depth interview with popular fantasy author John Marco, horoscopes, and some other incidental bits and pieces, pieces and bits.