For Moving Pictures I reviewed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.

Check out what else I had to say at Moving Pictures.

In the latest Nexus Graphica column, I call out Mark Millar on his portrayal of multiple sclerosis in Superior #1.

In the article, I cite several other flaws regarding Millar’s view of MS. I also review Guerillas Volume 1, The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor Volume One, and Victorian Undead: Sherlock Holmes vs Zombies.

Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.

The Six Million Dollar Man: The Complete Collection

Promo copy:

You’ll get all 100 episodes of the groundbreaking series, all digitally remastered and restored for pristine clarity.

The Six Million Dollar Man: The Complete Collection is housed in a 40-DVD Collector’s Box that includes a bionic sound chip and a special 3D lenticular design of Steve Austin.

Plus, you’ll get over 17 hours of bonus features, including:

Exclusive new interviews with Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner

All three Six Million Dollar Man pilot movies

All three Six Million Dollar Man reunion movies

All Bionic Woman crossover episodes

17 exclusive featurettes

Audio Commentaries and Other Interactive Features

We have the technology. We have the DVDs. The Six Million Dollar Man: The Complete Collection is now available.

Watch for details soon on how to win this extraordinary set from RevolutionSF!

The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Promo copy:

On a suburban street, two masked men seize a young woman. They bind and gag her and take her to an abandoned, soundproofed apartment. She is Alice Creed (Gemma Arterton), daughter of a millionaire. Her kidnappers, the coldly efficient Vic (Eddie Marsan) and his younger accomplice Danny (Martin Compston), have worked out a meticulous plan. But Alice is not going to play the perfect victim – she’s not giving in without a fight. In a tense power-play of greed, duplicity and survival we discover that sometimes disappearances can be deceptive…

Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.

This is one of those rare times that I’m actually excited about every book posted. I eagerly look forward to reading each of these.

Our White Boy
by Jerry Craft with Kathleen Sullivan
Foreword by Larry Lester

Promo copy:

At the outset of summer break in 1959, Texas Tech senior Jerry Craft had no more enticing options than to stay home and help on the family ranch–so the telephoned offer to play for a semipro baseball club he’d never heard of came as a welcome surprise.

But Craft was in for an even bigger surprise when he reported for tryout and discovered he’d been recruited for the West Texas Colored League.

Wichita Falls/Graham Stars manager Carl Sedberry persuaded Craft to put aside his misgivings and pitch for the Stars. Despite the derision of black teammates, fans, and opponents, and his own trepidation, ”that white boy” took the mound to close a rousing victory in his first game. At home and on the road in segregated Texas, Craft saw discrimination firsthand and from every side. Yet out of his two seasons with the Stars comes an unlikely story of respect, character, humor, and ultimately friendship as the teammates pulled together to succeed in a game they loved.

WIKI: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit
by Alan J. Porter
Illustrated by Doug Potter

Promo copy:

Looking for a way to increase team collaboration? Do you need a better way manage your company’s knowledge? Do you need a way to manage projects with customers or suppliers outside your company firewall? Would you like your customers to provide feedback on the information you publish? Then a wiki might be just what you are looking for. WIKI: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit introduces the concept of wikis, and shows why they are becoming the must-have communications and collaboration technology for businesses of any size. Porter provides up-to-date information on selecting a wiki, getting started, overcoming resistance to wikis, maintaining your wiki, and using your wiki for internal collaboration, project planning, communication with your customers, and more. The book includes five case studies that highlight the ways companies are using wikis to solve business and communication problems, increase efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction.

Yes, this is the same Alan J. Porter who wrote The Cars comic, Star Trek: A Comic Book History, and James Bond: The History Of The Illustrated 007.

Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games
by A. Bartlett Giamatti

Promo copy:

A philosophical musing on sports and play, this wholly inspiring and utterly charming reissue of Bart Giamatti’s long-out-of-print final book, Take Time for Paradise, puts baseball in the context of American life and leisure. Giamatti begins with the conviction that our use of free time tells us something about who we are. He explores the concepts of leisure, American-style. And in baseball, the quintessential American game, he finds its ultimate expression. "Sports and leisure are our reiteration of the hunger for paradise— for freedom untrammeled." Filled with pithy truths about such resonant subjects as ritual, self-betterment, faith, home, and community, Take Time for Paradise gives us much more than just baseball. These final, eloquent thoughts of "the philosopher king of baseball" (Seattle Weekly) are a joyful, reverent celebration of the sport Giamatti loved and the country that created it.

Unlike yesterday with its sparse attendance, throngs of people, wall-to-wall, filled the Austin Convention Center. Fans waited in long lines to get a picture with Adam West and Burt Ward while standing in front of the Batmobile and to meet Lee Majors and Ray Park.

Click on image to enlarge

Photo by Alan J. Porter

Disappointingly, the legendary Michael Golden garnered little attention. It was particularly glaring considering across the aisle hundreds waited for Joe Madureira.

Art by Michael Golden

I spent a thoroughly entertaining lunch with Chew artist Rob Guillory. We discussed the origins of the popular title, his career, working with John Layman, and our mutual respect for Image Comics PR and Marketing Coordinator Betsy Gomez.

Before lunch while waiting for Guillory to finish talking with some of his many fans, I noticed the artwork Kody Chamberlain. Set up on the table next to Guillory, his stark, realistic work created quite a contrast to his neighbor’s cartoony-style. Chamberlain’s beautifully rendered comic Sweets details a New Orleans crime story in the days leading up to Katrina.

Art by Kody Chamberlain

Though I appreciated the pavilion aspect, rather than being buried in some dank room somewhere, of the gaming happenings, it was dominated by that symbol of 1990s avarice Magic: The Gathering. What about the more modern, egalitarian card game Dominion? Or the excellent sci-fi board game tie-in Battlestar Galactica?

I stopped and chatted with artist Paul Maybury (whose recent works can be seen in Strange Tales II #2) at the STAPLE! booth.

Click on image to enlarge

Page from Paul Maybury’s story in Strange Tales II #2

All-in-all, another fun, albeit tiring day. This show is proving to be infinitely more fun than the last Wizard World Texas I attended.

My Sunday visit will probably prove to be a short one. Running out of steam.

After my previous experience at a Wizard World show, I approached day one of Austin’s first Wizard World Texas with some trepidation. Back in 2008, I wrote this about the show, then in Dallas:

Thankfully, my initial impressions after touring the convention floor ran closer to my hopes for the comics field. Mature and accomplished works dominated.

I chatted at length with The Intergalactic Nemesis writer Jason Neulander and artist Tim Doyle (who is currently producing an educational comic book for Texas prisoners!). Neulander is taking the radio show on the road in 2011. Watch for The Intergalactic Nemesis in Houston, Dallas, and even Kansas.

Art by Tim Doyle

Rob Guillory gladly signed (complete with an original sketch of Mason Savoy) my copy of Chew Omnivore Edition Volume 1. More on the talented artist later as I’m interviewing him tomorrow.

Sketch by Rob Guillory in my copy of Chew Omnivore Edition Volume 1

House of Mystery and JSA All-Stars scribe Matthew Sturges introduced me to Dean Trippe and his amazing retro artistic stylings.

Art by Dean Trippe

Even though we share countless friends and acquaintances, oddly Ape Entertainment Director of Marketing Brent Erwin and I had never met until today. After our brief discussion (with promises of more later), I’m glad we finally rectified the oversight.

I wandered the halls with fellow RevolutionSF editor Alan J. Porter, blogger/critic Sarah Arnold (expect a major RevSF announcement concerning Ms. Arnold soon!), and musician/writer/animator Tony Salvaggio.

The only book I bought shocked me not for the content but rather than I had never head of it!

How had a graphic novel about King Kong creators Cooper and Schoedsack escaped my notice? Based on Spawn of Skull Island: The Making of King Kong, adapter Susan Svehla relied on a fumetti style for The Amazingly True Adventures of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack.

After an unexpectedly fun and productive day, I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.

Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures
by Robert E. Howard
Illustrated by John Watkiss

Promo copy:

The immortal legacy of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Cimmerian, continues with this latest compendium of Howard’s fiction and poetry. These adventures, set in medieval-era Europe and the Near East, are among the most gripping Howard ever wrote, full of pageantry, romance, and battle scenes worthy of Tolstoy himself. Most of all, they feature some of Howard’s most unusual and memorable characters, including Cormac FitzGeoffrey, a half-Irish, half-Norman man of war who follows Richard the Lion-hearted to twelfth-century Palestine—or, as it was known to the Crusaders, Outremer; Diego de Guzman, a Spaniard who visits Cairo in the guise of a Muslim on a mission of revenge; and the legendary sword woman Dark Agnès, who, faced with an arranged marriage to a brutal husband in sixteenth-century France, cuts the ceremony short with a dagger thrust and flees to forge a new identity on the battlefield.

Lavishly illustrated by award-winning artist John Watkiss and featuring miscellanea, informative essays, and a fascinating introduction by acclaimed historical author Scott Oden, Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures is a must-have for every fan of Robert E. Howard, who, in a career spanning just twelve years, won a place in the pantheon of great American writers.

I’m loving these Del Rey collections of REH stuff, but when does Mark Finn, our own resident Howard expert, get to write an introduction?

The Wolf Age
by James Enge

Promo copy:

"Spear-age, sword-age:
shields are shattered.
Wind-age, wolf-age:
before the world founders
no man will show mercy to another."

Wuruyaaria: city of werewolves, whose raiders range over the dying northlands, capturing human beings for slaves or meat. Wuruyaaria: where a lone immortal maker wages a secret war against the Strange Gods of the Coranians. Wuruyaaria: a democracy where some are more equal than others, and a faction of outcast werewolves is determined to change the balance of power in a long, bloody election year.

Their plans are laid; the challenges known; the risks accepted. But all schemes will shatter in the clash between two threats few had foreseen and none had fully understood: a monster from the north on a mission to poison the world, and a stranger from the south named Morlock Ambrosius.

The Human Blend
by Alan Dean Foster

Promo copy:

Alan Dean Foster’s brilliant new novel is a near-future thriller that has all the dark humor and edgy morality of an Elmore Leonard mystery, in addition to the masterly world-building and quirky but believable characters readers expect from Foster. This gripping adventure reveals a place where criminals are punished through genetic engineering and bodily manipulation—which poses profound questions about what it means to be human.

Given his name because radical surgery and implants have reduced him to preternatural thinness, Whispr is a thug. His partner in crime, Jiminy Cricket, has also been physically altered with nanocarbonic prosthetic legs and high-strength fast-twitch muscle fibers that give him great jumping abilities. In a dark alley in Savannah, Whispr and Jiminy murder what they take to be a random tourist in order to amputate and then fence his sophisticated artificial hand. But the hapless victim also happens to be carrying an unusual silver thread that appears to be some kind of storage medium. Ever quick to scent potential profit, Whispr and Jiminy grab the thread as well.

Chance later deposits a wounded Whispr at the clinic of Dr. Ingrid Seastrom. Things have not gone smoothly for Whispr since he acquired the mysterious thread. Powerful forces are searching for him, and Jiminy has vanished. All Whispr wants to do is sell the thread as quickly as he can. When he offers to split the profits with Ingrid in exchange for her medical services, she makes an astonishing discovery.

So begins a unique partnership. Unlike Whispr, Ingrid is a natural, with no genetic or bodily alteration. She is also a Harvard-educated physician, while Whispr’s smarts are strictly of the street variety. Yet together they make a formidable team—as long as they can elude the enhanced assassins that are tracking them.

Bloodshot
by Cherie Priest

Promo copy:

Raylene Pendle (AKA Cheshire Red), a vampire and world-renowned thief, doesn’t usually hang with her own kind. She’s too busy stealing priceless art and rare jewels. But when the infuriatingly charming Ian Stott asks for help, Raylene finds him impossible to resist—even though Ian doesn’t want precious artifacts. He wants her to retrieve missing government files—documents that deal with the secret biological experiments that left Ian blind. What Raylene doesn’t bargain for is a case that takes her from the wilds of Minneapolis to the mean streets of Atlanta. And with a psychotic, power-hungry scientist on her trail, a kick-ass drag queen on her side, and Men in Black popping up at the most inconvenient moments, the case proves to be one hell of a ride.

More in Part II

Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.

Thirteen Years Later
by Jasper Kent

Promo copy:

Aleksandr made a silent promise to the Lord. God would deliver him–would deliver Russia–and he would make Russia into the country that the Almighty wanted it to be. He would be delivered from the destruction that wasteth at noonday, and from the pestilence that walketh in darkness–the terror by night…

1825, Europe–and Russia–have been at peace for ten years. Bonaparte is long dead and the threat of invasion is no more. For Colonel Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, life is peaceful. Not only have the French been defeated but so have the twelve monstrous creatures he once fought alongside, and then against, ten or more years ago. His duty is still to serve and to protect his tsar, Aleksandr the First, but now the enemy is human.

However the Tsar knows that he can never be at peace. Of course, he is aware of the uprising fermenting within the Russian army–among his supposedly loyal officers. No, what troubles him is something that threatens to bring damnation down upon him, his family and his country. The Tsar has been reminded of a promise: a promise born of blood…a promise that was broken a hundred years before.

Now the one who was betrayed by the Romanovs has returned to exact revenge for what has been denied him. And for Aleksei, knowing this chills his very soul. For it seems the vile pestilence that once threatened all he believed in and all he held dear has returned, thirteen years later…

Looking forward to jumping into the sequel to Twelve, which was one of the best vampire novels of the young century.

The Warlord’s Legacy
by Ari Marmell

Promo copy:

Corvis Rebaine, the Terror of the East, a man as quick with a quip as he is with a blade, returns in this highly anticipated sequel to Ari Marmell’s acclaimed The Conqueror’s Shadow, a debut hailed for its refreshing take on dark fantasy and surprising flashes of sharp, sarcastic wit. Now Marmell raises the stakes in a story that has all the humor and excitement of its predecessor, plus a terrifying new villain so evil that he may well be a match for Rebaine himself.

For let’s not forget how Corvis Rebaine came by the charming nickname “Terror of the East.” Certainly no one else has forgotten. Corvis Rebaine is no hero. In his trademark suit of black armor and skull-like helm, armed with a demon-forged axe, in command of a demonic slave, and with allies that include a bloodthirsty ogre, Rebaine has twice brought death and destruction to Imphallion in pursuit of a better, more equitable and just society. If he had to kill countless innocents in order to achieve that dream, so be it.

At least that was the old Rebaine. Before he slew the mad warlord Audriss. Before he banished the demon Khanda. Before he lost his wife and children, who could not forgive or forget his violent crimes. Now, years later, Rebaine lives in a distant city, under a false name, a member of one of the Guilds he despises, trying to achieve change nonviolently, from within the power structure.

Not even when the neighboring nation of Cephira invades Imphallion and the bickering Guilds prove unable to respond does Rebaine return to his old habits of slaughter. But someone else does. Someone wearing Rebaine’s black armor and bearing what appears to be his axe. Someone who is, if anything, even less careful of human life than Rebaine was.

Now Baron Jassion, Rebaine’s old nemesis, is hunting him once more, aided by a mysterious sorcerer named Kaleb, whose powers and secrets make him a more dangerous enemy than Rebaine has ever known. Even worse, accompanying them is a young woman who hates Corvis Rebaine perhaps more than anyone else: his own daughter, Mellorin. Suddenly Rebaine seems to have no choice. To clear his name, to protect his country, and to reconcile with his family, must he once again become the Terror of the East?

Echo City
by Tim Lebbon

Promo copy:

Surrounded by a vast, poisonous desert, Echo City is built upon the graveyard of its own past. Most inhabitants believe that their city and its subterranean Echoes are the whole of the world, but there are a few dissenters. Peer Nadawa is a political exile, forced to live with criminals in a ruinous slum. Gorham, once her lover, leads a ragtag band of rebels against the ruling theocracy. Nophel, a servant of that theocracy, dreams of revenge from his perch atop the city’s tallest spire. And beneath the city, a woman called Nadielle conducts macabre experiments in genetic manipulation using a science indistinguishable from sorcery. They believe there is something more beyond the endless desert . . . but what?

It is only when a stranger arrives from out of the wastes that things begin to change. Frail and amnesiac, he holds the key to a new beginning for Echo City—or perhaps to its end, for he is not the only new arrival. From the depths beneath Echo City, something ancient and deadly is rising. Now Peer, Gorham, Nophel, and Nadielle msut test the limits of love and loyalty, courage and compassion, as they struggle to save a city collapsing under the weight of its own history.

More in Part I

Got this oddity today from Image.

And now you know everything I know about what I assume is a promotion for a forthcoming title.

On October 1 as part of the RevolutionSF six day extravaganza, the Uncanny Un-Collectibles, Wayne Beamer lamented the lack of a collected Chase.

When y’all hit your local shop tomorrow to pick up your new comics, you might notice a book titled DC Presents: Chase.

Here’s the skinny from the DC page:

While it’s not exactly what Wayne was clamoring for, it’s a start.

Now if only the fine folks at DC would finally give us those Scribbly, Secret Six, Rip Hunter, and Plop collections…