AMC Orders Six Episodes Of ‘The Walking Dead’ Comic Book

AMC have today officially announced their order of a six-episode first season of The Walking Dead, adapted from Robert Kirkman’s comic book series. Frank Darabont is writing and directing, at the very least for the pilot episode, and that’s recommendation enough for me.

The series is set to premiere during AMC’s annual marathon of horror and thriller programming, which they’re now calling Fearfest. Seems like a solid launching pad… in fact, I imagine the unveiling of such a hotly anticipated series as this in the season will actually give the marathon a boost.

The press release also announced that Jon Bernthal has been cast as Officer Shane, a key player and best-friend of the protagonist, Office Rick Grimes. Not yet official, but already reported, is that Jonny Lee Miller is the current front runner for the role of Rick.

 

This casting is according to Bloody Disgusting. They describe the character as “a police officer who leads a group of zombie survivors in search of a safe place to live during the apocalypse”, which will do for now, and posted this excellent comparison between the Grimes of the comic and the real Miller. Read more

Napoleon: Total War – Imperial Guard Pack DLC

I had a nice surprise on my computer this morning when I jumped into Napoleon: Total War….some free goodies…The Imperial Guard Pack which includes an alternate Waterloo Battle from the British side.

The Imperial Guard Pack features 6 brand new units and contain an alternative version of the Battle of Waterloo, fought from the British perspective.

The Battle of Waterloo (18 June, 1815) Alternative version

Napoleon had the feeling he had won the war as he advanced towards the Anglo-Dutch army at Waterloo. The Prussians were retreating, pursued by a French corps, and only Wellington remained. French armies would be victorious once again, and the Empire would be reborn in fire. But the history book on the shelf would not be repeating itself…

This alternative version includes:
• Britain as the playable faction.
• Two of the new unit from the Imperial Guard Pack are included in the battle
• The French have more troops meaning that the battle is balanced differently.

Read more

‘Twilight GN’ Sets 1st Week Sales Record – 66,000 Copies

The graphic novel adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight sold over 66,000 copies during its first week of sales, the largest debut ever for a graphic novel in the U.S. Twilight: The Graphic Novel Vol.1, which was illustrated by Korean artist Young Kim, also broke the record for the largest first printing for a graphic novel will 350,000 copies (see “Twilight GN Gets 350,000 First Printing”).

The Twilight Graphic Novel was released on March 16th, just four days before the Saturday debut of The Twilight Saga: New Moon DVD, which sold over 4 million copies over the weekend (see “New Moon DVD Sells 4 Million”).

The third Twilight movie debuts in theaters on June 30th. Yen Press, which publishes the Twilight graphic novels, will announce the release date of the second Twilight GN shortly.

Source

Hubble Confirms The Accelerated Expansion Of The Universe

Astronomers have been studying the results of the biggest survey ever conducted by the Hubble space telescope with an international team of scientists, led by Tim Schrabback of the Leiden Observatory and Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the University of British Columbia. The team has been poring over data covering more than 446,000 galaxies in the hopes to better understand cosmic expansion, using ground-based telescopes to compliment the data. What did they find? Not only is the universe getting larger, but it’s getting larger at an accelerated rate.

The technique being used is called weak lensing, whereby astronomers study distortions to find out more about the characteristics of distant galaxies. The heart of the study has been on dark matter: “Dark energy affects our measurements for two reasons,” the University of Bonn’s Benjamin Joachimi said. “First, when it is present, galaxy clusters grow more slowly, and secondly, it changes the way the Universe expands, leading to more distant — and more efficiently lensed — galaxies. Our analysis is sensitive to both effects.”

The study also calls back to Einstein, according to Martin Kilbinger from the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris: “Our study also provides an additional confirmation for Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicts how the lensing signal depends on redshift.”

As for the Hubble, its survey saw it circle the Earth 600 times, photograph the same area of the universe with a slight overlap 575 times, requiring 1,000 man hours of observation.

This clearer map, according to Harvard’s William High, made all the difference: “Before, most of the studies were done in 2D, like taking a chest X-ray. Our study is more like a 3D reconstruction of the skeleton from a CT scan. On top of that, we are able to watch the skeleton of dark matter mature from the Universe’s youth to the present.”

Source

Netflix Streaming Through Your Wii – Coming Soon – Really

Here is a piece of news from the Netflix Blog…

Jessie Becker here from Marketing and we’ve got some great news to share. We are in the final phase of getting ready for the launch of streaming to Wii. Today, we shipped out instant streaming discs for the Wii to some of our Netflix members. Their feedback will ensure that we deliver a great experience to everyone when we launch. Instantly watching movies and TV episodes from Netflix via Wii will be available soon at no additional cost – all you need is a Netflix unlimited plan starting at $8.99 a month, a Wii console and a broadband Internet connection.

If you have reserved your disc already, you don’t need to do anything – we will send you an email as soon as we ship the disc. If you haven’t, reserve your disc today at www.netflix.com/Wii and stay tuned for a launch announcement!

Source

The Hobbit Begins Shooting In June

The Peter Jackson-produced, Guillermo del Toro-directed two-film adaptation of The Hobbit will begin shooting in June.

 

This according to actor Ian McKellen, who is returning as Gandalf. He wrote the following on his official website:

THE HOBBIT’s, two films, start shooting in New Zealand in June. Filming will take over a year. Casting in Los Angeles, New York City and London has started. The script too proceeds. The first draft is crammed with old and new friends, again on a quest in Middle Earth. The director Guillermo del Toro is now living in Wellington, close to the Jacksons’ and the studio in Miramar.

Source

Temuera Morrison Recruited For Role In ‘The Green Lantern’

New Zealand seems to be the place to recruit men and women for your fantasy or sci-fi epics. Martin Campbell visited Kiwi country to round out The Green Lantern, according to THR’s Heat Vision, and Temuera Morrison and Taika Waititi have joined the cast in minor roles.

Morrison, probably best known to American audiences as Jango "Father of Boba" Fett, will be playing Abin Sur. Abin Sur is a member of the Lantern Corps, and crashlands on Earth. In his dying moments, he searches for a worthy soul to be his replacement and wield the ring. The Ring chooses the young and cocky Hal Jordan as the successor. Obviously it’s not a huge role this time around, but there’s a possibility Abin Sur could return for sequels as the comics have him popping back to assist Jordan in various ghostly ways. It should also be interesting to see how they choose to portray the bald and red-skinned Abin Sur. Heat Vision is silent as to whether it will be motion capture or the old-fashioned technique known as "make-up."

Waititi’s part is a lot less mythological, as he’s merely playing "the best friend" of Jordan. I’m going to make a semi-educated guess and declare that he’s playing Tom Kalmaku. Tom was an Alaskan Inuit, and given a rather racist nickname by Jordan’s fellow pilots. Other than that wince-worthy moment, he’s a pretty neat character as he’s one of the only people in Jordan’s life who knows of his Green Lantern gig. He’s a good wingman. And who knows? Maybe we will see Waititi become one of the New Guardians in this age of crossover movies. Filming begins this week, so begin the countdown to costume photos!

Source

Marvel Digital Comics – Free Mondays (3/15/2010)

Welcome to FREE Mondays! Each week we focus on all of the newly digitized books you can read for FREE inside the greatest collection of Marvel comics available online: Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited! Plus, we’ll let you know what’s coming up next week for FREE, too! With each book, not only are you getting a free peek inside Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, but each free Digital Comic either gives you a look at a book featured in a recent collection or a comic that’s in stores now.

How would you like to have five free digital comics to help get you through the school and work week? Here ya go!

SPIDER-MAN: LEGEND OF THE SPIDER CLAN #1
SPIDER-MAN: LEGEND OF THE SPIDER CLAN #2
SPIDER-MAN: LEGEND OF THE SPIDER CLAN #3
SPIDER-MAN: LEGEND OF THE SPIDER CLAN #4
SPIDER-MAN: LEGEND OF THE SPIDER CLAN #5

Find out what next week’s five free digital comics will be below!

ULTIMATE X-MEN #63
ULTIMATE X-MEN #67
ULTIMATE X-MEN #68
ULTIMATE X-MEN #69
ULTIMATE X-MEN #70

Will Battlestar Galactica Online Work As A Browser-Based MMO?

Hey, look, a Battlestar Galactica MMO!

Leading [MMO publisher Bigpoint's] product slate for 2010 will be Battlestar Galactica Online, a tactical space combat and adventure MMOG based upon Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica series. The game, inspired by one of the most popular science fiction series in television history, will launch worldwide exclusively this fall on Syfy.com for a 30 day period. The Unity co-developed MMOG will offer state of the art graphics that can be played directly in an Internet browser.

I’m allergic to the word “browser” appearing anywhere in the same paragraph as “MMO” or even “game”, but that’s usually because it indicates some cutesy free-to-play thing that’s big in Korea, or else a social gaming pyramid scheme.

Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be case with Battlestar Galactica Online. The game is being developed by a Norwegian studio called Artplant that, as near as I can tell, isn’t yet guilty of any particularly bad online games. In fact, checking their website, they don’t seem to be guilty of many games at all. But they seem to have the right idea. Read more

Comics As ‘Top-Level’ Category For New iPad

The new bookstore for the iPad (see “Is iPad a Gamechanger?”) will include comics and graphic novels as one of 20 “top-level” categories, according to the blog on AppSlice, a new tool for browsing and finding apps. Manga will be included as a sub-category within the comics and graphic novel category, along with others. The 20 top-level categories will include around 150 sub-categories over-all.

This represents a significant improvement in the merchandising of digital comics as compared to the current sales through Apple’s app store, which will make comics easier to find for readers using the new device.

Source

Next Page »