The teaser trailer for Cowboys & Aliens came out this week, which lead many who haven’t been following the production to exclaim:

“Ok, cool, but Cowboys & Aliens? What, did they throw darts at a board to come up with their movie premise and then forget to change the working title?”

Leading others to respond:

“Or, they based it on the graphic novel of the same name?”

As it turns out, both parties are correct. Cowboys & Aliens only exists because back in the ’90s, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg trademarked the name, and tried to use that name and a prospective comic cover to get movie studios interested in the IP of Cowboys & Aliens, before there was even a book to base the movie on.

Got five figures to throw around on a piece of real comics history? Then you can go put in your bid at the Heritage Auction Galleries auction of the original pencil and inks of the first page of Watchmen, scripted by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons.

The bidding currently stands at $6,500, but don’t expect it to stay there for long. In the words of Heritage Auctions themselves:

Watchmen pages do not come along often, in fact Heritage has never offered one before! We know of many people who have read Watchmen who have never read any other comic book, and given that mass appeal, we expect very strong demand for this lot.

Just be careful when reading the rest of their description. It’s got a serious spoiler in it. ಠ_ಠ

Film Actu has three more photos (likely scanned from Empire magazine, according to Bleeding Cool) from Stephen Speilberg‘s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, and while they maintain an incredible fidelity to the comics, we’re still left out of the loop on the other major component of the movie’s cinematography.

Motion. As in motion capture. Which is how the movie was filmed.

Stephen Spielberg‘s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn has a star studded cast, with faces like Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis, Cary Elwes, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost. But even with principle filming over and done with, no one has really known what the film will look like… because it’s being entirely computer generated based on motion-capture footage.

That is until this week’s issue of Empire, which has some shots from the movie, currently in post production. So how do they look?

We know our President is a little bit of a geek, having admitted to once collecting comics, and threading Superman jokes into a speech at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner. But he’s not this much of a geek. He’s not actually reading Mark Millar‘s Superior. That’s a photoshop. A photoshop that seems to be the weapon of a badly managed unsubtle grab at attention from somebody.

As Bleeding Cool points out, if Mark Millar is behind the ‘shop, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Rob Liefeld is best known for the incredible feat of becoming a professional comic book writer and artist despite a known reputation for missing deadlines and being disproportionately egotistical, and an inability to draw the following things: feet, hands, women, muscles, and perspective.

What’s next on the docket for the comic book world’s greatest successful troll? A comic about the zombie uprising that corresponded with the death of Jesus, according (sort of) to the Book of Matthew.

Remember those alternate universe comic book covers that DC cooked up for a sneaky appearance in an episode of Fringe?

No?

Well, go look, they were pretty cool. They appeared in this year’s Fringe season finale, as alternate versions of some of the most famous DC issues. Meltdown Comics has gotten a hold of one of each of the five fake covers, and is auctioning them off, with all the proceeds going to Autism Speaks.

Lion-O Is Ceiling Cat For Some Reason (FashionablyGeek)

Square Enix Is Making A Christmas Album (GameInformer)

StarCraft II‘s New Minigames (Kotaku)

Marvel Shelves Runaways Movie (Bleeding Cool)

ABC, CBS, and NBC Are All Blocked on Google TV (The Wall Street Journal)

CALM DOWN: Rumors of Star Wars Sequel Trilogy are Unfounded (Wired)

BlizzCon Costumes, Day 1 (WoW Insider)

(pic via Guyism.)

When the Marvel/Disney merger was made official, a lot of people immediately plundered the wide ranging crossover potential, from Spider-Man in Kingdom Hearts to a Beast buddy movie.

Today we see the first shamelessly tied in fruit of that union, in the form of a series of variant covers for Marvel’s November titles, where ten of Marvel’s biggest characters get reinterpreted Tron-style.

Spain Holds National Siesta Championship (CNN)

Keith Richards Will Be in Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (ScreenRant)

Together At Last: Scooby-Doo and Cthulhu (Nerdvana)

5 Times The US Almost Nuked Itself (io9)

Pres. Obama Endorses American Comic Series Re: Islamic Superheroes. Right Wing Flips Out (Bleeding Cool)

Old Video Game TV Shows (GameInformer)

Awesome Pac-Man Halloween Decoration (Joystiq)

(pic via Reddit, rebuttal pic below.)