Yesterday DC Comics made a long expected announcement that they will be moving part of their offices to Burbank, California, to be closer to the movie studio that is looking forward to exploiting their characters for box office proceeds. As a part of that announcement, they also mentioned that they will be shutting down WildStorm, one of their relatively independent imprints. And so begins the speculation of what, exactly, will happen to the WildStorm Universe, a specific superhero setting with its own rules and concepts, much as the DC and Marvel Universes themselves.

I can pretty much guarantee that if you don’t read comics, you won’t recognize many of the titles that I’m going to mention below (although you might use it as a recommended reading list). If you do read comics, you’ll notice me mentioning quite a few examples of the most interesting out-of-the-box superhero stories of the last 20 years. They’re all Wildstorm titles, and they’re all being indefinitely boxed up at the end of this December so that they can maybe be incorporated into the DC Universe.

But before I get into what Wildstorm titles will be affected by the editorial apocalypse, a brief history lesson is in order, for irony’s sake if nothing else.

As far as superheroes go, the big studios tend to favor the ones that come with the most CGI, the biggest explosions, and the most renown. It’s easier to get a studio to pour billions of dollars into a movie if the average person on the street has heard of the main character, Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America, or the X-Men, for example. Big heroes, for big money.

According to CHUD.com, Marvel is experimenting to see if this is a true x=y equation: maybe smaller money could work for smaller characters. We don’t mean like the Atom or Henry Pym -

Well, actually we do.

Read on...

I was all ready to ignore Kick-Ass. To just let it slip past my radar and fade into obscurity like Lions Gate’s Frank Miller’s Will Eisner’s The Spirit. I don’t see the point of willfully subjecting myself to things that I know I will only find repugnant. But then The Independent‘s interview with Mark Millar flipped my nerdrage switch. And then, I watched the trailers, and now… here I am.

Now I know what Kick-Ass is about, other than, you know, violence. Just as I suspected, it is not an original concept, but to my surprise it is an interesting one. The idea of the realistic superhero, with or without powers, has been tackled over and over again. Watchmen, The Authority, Top 10, Batman Begins, Hancock, the X-Men, Spiderman and more have all attempted, in some way, to bring the superhero down to earth.

In a way, this makes me more angry. I’d much rather Millar take a dumb concept and make a bad movie, than watch him take an idea I am honestly intellectually and creatively interested in and make a hash of it.

Anyway, here’s the first bit that got me: Millar says “There’s never been a superhero comic set in the real world.”

I have a very good friend. We’re both writers, both geeks, and both talkers, so much so that we’ve developed a number of inside jokes that serve us as conversational shorthand. I would like to share one of them with the greater geek community. It refers to a certain sort of social situation, and we call it:

Flashing Your Geek