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Francis Manapul’s cover to Legion of Super-Heroes #38

Jim Shooter penned his first issue of DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes when he was only 13. Selling the stories to DC through the mail, Shooter created many of the Legion’s most popular characters and his run on the title (in Adventure Comics) is fondly remembered.

Now, a little over 30 years later, Shooter is once again writing Legion of Super-Heroes for DC. Shooter was a star in the comics universe for many years, well into the 90’s. He revolutionized Marvel comics in the 70’s and became known as Marvel’s most hated EIC (editor-in-chief). He had great success in the 90’s with Valiant Comics and his writing for Valiant was better than ever before. After a falling out with Valiant executives and a failed comics company called Defiant, Shooter has been absent from comics for about a decade.

His return to Legion isn’t a guaranteed success. As Chris Claremont’s return to the X-Men in 2000 showed, just because things were great before, doesn’t mean they will be again. Claremont left the Uncanny X-Men title after a 16 year stint. Fans of the series (myself included) pined for his return after the series floundered. In late 2000, when he finally returned after almost 10 years, to put things nicely, it wasn’t very good.

So, congratulations to DC and to Jim Shooter and let’s hope the Legion can continue the great success that Mark Waid’s reboot created.

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YouTube Spam – Seriously, how hard is it to implement a filter to keep people from posting their URL/Cam Site names as comments on my video posts. Any given day I can check and 1/3 of my new comments will be spam. Marking it spam never seems to work and I swear that if I mark it as spam, it reappears the next time I check the post.

Come on YouTube, let’s get some seriously good comment spam protection going.

Badly Formatted Top 10 Lists – You know that a good list (Top 10 Ways, Best, Most Sucessful, etc.) will get you on Digg no problem, but formatting that list with only one entry per page means that I probably won’t read it. How hard is it to make something easy to read? Do you want to turn away readers?

Here’s a good list – ASME’s Top 40 Magazine Covers and a bad list – AOL Money & Finance: Most Successful Movie Franchises.

Guess which one I read?

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Heath Ledger as the Joker

Lots of photos have popped up over on The Movie Blog Community and on a Flickr Page that show Heath ledger as the Joker, as well as several shots of Batman from the Summer 2008 Batman film, The Dark Knight.

I really like the way Ledger looks and I also like the fact that the “Joker look” appears to just be make-up and not some accident. The scarring around the mouth is hard to see and I wish that were a little more prominent, but overall, everything looks great and I absolutely can’t wait to see some footage from this.

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I’m not a Guitar Hero player. Partly because I don’t have a console to play it on and mostly because I don’t need anything else to distract me from the 100 other things that I need/want to do daily. Having said that, it looks like an incredibly fun game that plays right to my high-school, heavy metal days. If you’ve watched the video, you’ve seen the insanity that is the song “Through the Fire and the Flames byDragonForce. It’s got to be humanly impossible to do that on a video-game guitar. News I’ve read says the song/level is only a bonus, so it’s not part of the game play path of the full game.

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Image of the Hidden Mother/Child in Da Vinci’s Last Supper

I think someone’s been watching/reading too much Da Vinci Code. The idea that Da Vinci hid an image of a mother and a child in the Last Supper and it can only be seen when a mirror image of the painting is overlaid on the original is insane. Seriously.

Putting a mirror image of any image over itself and reducing the transparency will create all kinds of weirdness, especially in a photo/image full of figures. The mirrored and overlaid image may reveal what looks to be a mother and child, but it is pure accident. Looking at the image, I think it looks like Jesus is looking at the sky with his mouth open and is surrounded by ghosts. That’s not hidden in the image, it’s the mirror image. Seriously, this guy has too much time on his hands and to report it as news even makes it worse.