Reed Johnson caught up with Joe Sacco and found that the cartoonist and correspondent may be taking a break from his hot-zone reportage.

If our present era constitutes a sort of End Times for mainstream media, it's proving to be a golden age for Joe Sacco and other practitioners of comic-book reportage.

Balkan blood feuds, the "war on terror" and the agonies of post-diluvium New Orleans are just a few topics taken up by graphic journalists of late. No doubt, some intrepid cartoonist-correspondent is currently roaming Port-au-Prince, sketchbook and flip-cam in hand.

Sacco, 49, isn't just one of this evolving medium's most skilled advocates. He's widely credited with inventing a new genre, the investigative-reported war comic book.

Among his books are "Palestine" (2001), which won an American Book Award, and "Safe Area Goradze: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995" (2000), a chilling account of his sojourn in the former Yugoslavia. Reviewing the volume for the Los Angeles Times, David Rieff concluded that, "of the myriad books that have appeared about Bosnia, few have told the truth more bravely than Sacco's."

But as Sacco sat in a West Hollywood cafe one recent morning, he was vexed by thoughts of the Haitian earthquake and how the rest of the world will handle its humanitarian aftershocks.

"People respond so well to victims of a natural disaster," said the author, who was born in Malta and raised in Australia and the United States. "But give it a couple of weeks, and when they see that a victim of a natural disaster is going to get angry about something or impatient, people are going to lose interest or feel they're not grateful or something like that. Our hearts break for about a week, and then we kind of want to move on."

Sacco's unease goes to the core of "Footnotes in Gaza," his latest book-length comic from inhumanity's front lines. A disturbing first-person chronicle that's also a work of forensic anthropology, it attempts to reconstruct an all-but-forgotten chapter in the long, bloody history of Arab-Israeli relations: the alleged massacre of hundreds of Palestinian civilians by Israeli troops in late 1956, during the Suez crisis.

Earlier that year, as Cold War tensions spilled into the Middle East, a series of cross-border skirmishes broke out between the Israeli Army and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Israeli troops entered Gaza, determined to quell what the Israeli leadership viewed as an insurgency spearheaded by Egyptian-backed guerrillas.

All the ingredients were present for a violent denouement. It came, according to a United Nations report, when 275 Palestinians in Khan Yunis and 111 in Rafah, near the Egyptian border, were killed during Israeli operations. The Israelis insisted they were rooting out a hostile enemy, but Palestinians contended that armed resistance had ceased before the troops arrived.

Sacco chose to excavate these events because he thinks they crystallize the ongoing conflict. The book quotes Hamas leader Abdulaziz Rantisi, who was a 9-year-old living in Khan Yunis in 1956 and recalled his uncle being killed. "It left a wound in my heart that can never heal," he told Sacco. "They planted hatred in our hearts."

By dialing back the clock, Sacco said, he hopes to bring insight to a cycle of violent retribution and political stalemate that is as tragically timely as this morning's Twitter feeds.

"I'm not necessarily saying that '56 informs how people now are reacting. But '56 brutalized a generation of Palestinians," he said. "Ultimately that generation is going to convey frustration, anger, bitterness, maybe hatred to kids who are also undergoing their own incidents and their own problems. So it's like this compounded history."

Sacco also was drawn to the subject because it had generated so little historical or journalistic writing. He recorded the testimony of many Palestinian eyewitnesses and survivors. He also interviewed a number of Israeli historians and such boots-on-the-ground figures as Mordechai Bar-On, who served as right-hand man to Moshe Dayan, Israel's former defense and foreign minister.

Employing cinematic techniques (extreme close-ups, aerial perspectives), "Footnotes" leapfrogs between 1956 and 2003, when Sacco did his field research. The 418-page book, which took about 6 1/2 years to complete, contains four appendixes and a bibliography.

As in his previous books, Sacco depicts himself as a secondary character and details his reporting methods. He appears as a restlessly curious, occasionally bemused, slightly built figure with round-frame glasses that obscure his eyes.

In person, he's pretty much the same. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of his features is how indeterminate they are. "I'm often told I look Asian," said the author, a longtime resident of Portland, Ore. "I never blend in anywhere. I always feel like a weirdo."

According to Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times foreign correspondent, Sacco is a throwback. As many mainstream media outlets cut back on expensive foreign and investigative reporting, Hedges said, "journalism is going to revert to what it was before, and that is an art form."

In that regard, he continued, Sacco is carrying forward a tradition of empathetic, morally driven journalistic novelists including Balzac, Dickens and Upton Sinclair. "A great journalist is an artist. What else is 'Hiroshima' by John Hersey other than a work of art?"

Sacco admits that "Footnotes" generally adopts the Palestine perspective. Growing up in America, he said, conditioned him to think of Palestinians as terrorists. "I never learned who they were, why they were doing what they were doing or any of the context."

Yet gradually, he began to study the Middle East and discover alternative narratives. Because the U.S. media remain likely to convey the Israel viewpoint, he said, "I do want to bring Palestinian voices to the fore. Which isn't to say I'm going to sugarcoat the Palestinians."

Sacco is pessimistic about the prospects for a resolution to the conflicts he delineates in his book. "You can speak to someone from Hamas and some far-right Likudnik, and they're both going to say they want peace," he said. "The word itself means nothing, because they want peace on their terms."

And he thinks this may be his last book of this type, at least for a while.

"I can sit in a nice wine bar in Portland," he said, "having a good conversation and some really nice food, and yes, my mind sort of goes back to people who can't have that and have no opportunities, have had their homes demolished. But definitely I think it can wear you out. And I'm kind of at that point."

-- Reed Johnson

"Footnotes in Gaza" is a bookshelf lighting rod

LAT REVIEW: "Footnotes," striking an uneasy balance 

The grim dance of "Waltz With Bashir"

Art Spiegelman's grim psychedelic years

 LAT REVIEW: Crumb's "Genesis" is electrifying

Crumb gets biblical but had "no intention to ridicule"

PHOTO:Joe Sacco in West Hollywood in February 2010. (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times).

PART 3: PHILIP K. DICK, THE LAST DECADE

During the last years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in, of all places, Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land (to borrow from Robert Heinlein). This is the third of a six-part series looking at those final years. The series is written by Scott Timberg, the L.A. freelance journalist who runs the West Coast culture blog the Misread City. He's also a longtime (albeit sometimes closeted) fan of science fiction.

While in Orange County, Dick often fell back on the reflexes of Bay Area types who move to Southern California. He joked often about the artificiality of it all, the local slang. “He kept comparing Southern California to Disneyland,” remembered wife Tessa Dick, “and said it was plastic, wasn’t real. He was used to real cities like Berkeley and San Francisco and Vancouver.”

To a writer whose primary subject was the slippage between the real and constructed, the place surely also fascinated him as well. “He loves fakes and simulacra as much as he fears them,” novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote in the introduction to Dick’s selected stories. He calls Dick very much a man of the 1950s, holding “a perfectly typical 1950s obsession with the images, the consumer, the bureaucrat, and with the plight of small men struggling under the imperatives of capitalism.”

Dick, an unceasingly self-conscious and skeptical writer, was also aware of the Bay Area cliché he was falling into. In the novel “Radio Free Albemuth,” written mostly in 1976, a narrator named Phil Dick spoke of the insularity of the Bay Area’s coffeehouse-and-Trotsky community, describing “the isolation of the Berkeley radicals” as well as their caricature of the rest of the country.

Orange County, he wrote, was “far to the south of us, an area so reactionary to us that in Berkeley it seemed like a phantom land, made of the mists of dire nightmare… Orange County, which no one in Berkeley had ever actually seen, was the fantasy at the other end of the world, Berkeley’s opposite.”

Kidding aside, there were certainly times when suburban SoCal, and life as a married father, didn’t satisfy him. “I hadn’t realized before how [expletive] dumb and dull and futile and empty middle-class life is,” he wrote in a 1975 letter. “I have gone from the gutter (circa 1971) to the plastic container.”

Dick’s supposed paranoia didn’t wane during these years: As often happened, the culture – and American history – caught up with him. Dick was fond of pointing out that the Watergate trials validated his obsession with conspiracy. Tessa, who is hoping to run for Congress as a Libertarian, says that his distrust of the government and fear of the police state increased during his decade in Southern California.

Lethem, editor of Dick’s Library of America volumes, called this “a period where he seems less grounded in place.” From the evidence of Dick’s work, Lethem said, it’s a time “of very strong alienation from any real environment – it’s about Disneyland, about condos where you park your car under the building, where you barely get to know your neighbors. It was about Nixon. It’s almost like Dick was a spy in Orange County… a mole within the culture.”

(Here's a photo of actor Shea Whigham in the upcoming film adaptation of "Radio Free Albemuth.")

Of course, being far from any urban center or major attraction suited Dick just fine during this last decade. “He was home 24/7,” Tessa said. “He didn’t go out very much.” Besides Big John’s, his favorite pizza place, the nearest spot of interest was the Cal State Fullerton campus, where the author’s papers were held. (Some of them have recently been relocated, perhaps temporarily, to San Francisco.) Today the area is dominated by low-slung, pale stucco buildings and fast food chains, and back then it wasn’t much different.

The couple wasn’t lonely, though. “People came to us,” Tessa recalled. “Nearly every day we had visitors. One night for dinner we had two men from France, one from Germany, and one woman from Sweden. One of them was writing a PhD thesis on Phil.” Dick flirted with the Swede, saying, “You are a pretty lady” in rough German.

During his last few years, when he became financially stable for one of the rare times in his life, his daughters visited him at the Santa Ana apartment he moved to after the implosion of his marriage. Dick’s oldest child, daughter Laura, born in 1960, recalls his place full of Bibles, encyclopedias – Dick was a ferocious autodidact – and recordings of Wagner operas.

Phil’s second daughter Isolde, now 42, visited enough during this period to get to know her father for the first time. She recalls him as working hard to be a good father and struggling to overcome his limitations, both with and without success.

During one visit, he got Isa excited about a trip to Disneyland, then open past midnight. “He said, ‘We’re gonna go and stay ‘til it closes!’ But in my mind we were there for only 20 or 30 minutes before he said, ‘Honey, my back’s really hurting.’ I think he was just overwhelmed by all the crowds. I knew him, and knew he was uncomfortable moving outside his comfort zone.”

He spent more of his time walking from the apartment to a nearby Trader Joe’s to get sandwiches, a park where he and Isa tried awkwardly to play kickball, and an Episcopalian church where he had running theological discussions with the clergy.

He’d bought himself a Fiat sports car, but almost never drove, telling Isa, “Honey, I’m just so excited to see you, I’m too excited to drive.” She learned quickly to read her father’s code, which seemed designed to protect her from ugly realities.

Sometimes he’d stay up all night, leaving his visitors laughing for hours as he spun idea after idea, or wrote, in a blaze, until dawn. “He could go from that really engaging personality to being withdrawn and closed off,” Isa remembered, explaining that he would sometimes cancel visits at the last minute. “I could tell when we spoke on the phone his voice would go really low and flat. When he had that tone he was depressed. He’d say something like he had the flu. ‘The flu’ was usually his code.”

Tessa recalls more acute eccentricities.

“He was obsessed with ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ which he had to see because of the Kennedy assassination,” she said of the 1962 film in which a conspiracy is triggered by the Queen of Diamonds.  “I didn’t figure out until later why Phil wouldn’t let me get out a deck of cards to play solitaire. And I really like to play cards.”

Of course, to other residents of Dick’s place – which became a condo, giving the author the opportunity to serve as chair of the Rules and Grievances Committee – the man was an enigma. “Grooming was not his priority,” former neighbor Catherine Cate told Patrick Kiger of Orange Coast magazine. To these ‘80s suburbanites, the rambling, speculative quality of his conversation “was a little bewildering. You’d listen and look at him and think, ‘Is this guy on the same planet?’ And the answer was probably no.” 

-- Scott Timberg

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PHOTOS: Philip K. Dick and his wife, Tessa, in the 1970s (Courtesy of Tessa Dick). A scene from "Radio Free Albemuth" (Open Pictures).
 

Steven Zeitchik is back on the Hero Complex today with a look at the politics of "Avatar." Does the film prove that moviegoers don't mind political messages in their movies -- or that they don't just notice them when giant blue aliens start running around the screen? 

Conservative blogger Joshua Huffman devotes at least several hours a day to right-leaning media and blogs, which have offered him plenty of rhetoric about the wrongheaded politics of James Cameron's "Avatar."

Yet when it came time to pick a movie this holiday season, Huffman, who also runs his own blog, The Virgina Conservative, knew there was only one film that would top his list. So Huffman braved a snowstorm to see "Avatar" on opening weekend. "It’s a movie I really enjoyed, even if I didn’t agree with a lot of the underlying messages," he said, adding that he probably would see "Avatar" again and has recommended it to many friends.

Huffman isn't alone. "Avatar" has gone north of $1 billion at the worldwide box office, and domestically the blue-alien movie is a sensation in both red states as well as blue states despite some fierce conservative criticism of the movie and its perceived political messages.

Big-budget studio movies usually mute their ideology as they seek a wide audience. But "Avatar" has inflamed the passions of right-wing bloggers and pundits. Cameron incensed many voices on the right by acknowledging of-the-moment messages about imperialism, greed, ecological disregard and corporate irresponsibility in his movie about the 22nd-century plundering of a distant moon called Pandora. The film (contrary to plenty of blog posts out there) does not show American military units in action -- the aggressors on Pandora are mercenaries in services of a corporation -- but that distinction was missed or deemed unimportant by many commentators; one reason may be the use of terms such as "shock and awe" and "war on terror" in some of the most heated parts of the movie. Cameron may have deployed mercenaries of the future but it's clear that he drafted contemporary issues for his cinematic campaign.

There was plenty of return fire. Writing in the Weekly Standard, conservative commentator John Podhoretz called the movie's clash between heavily armed humans and an indigenous tribe of aliens as "anti-American, anti-human." In an upcoming piece in Commentary magazine, Stephen Hunter writes that "the movie essentially decodes into a 1960s pseudo-intellectual's power-trip dream." A headline on a piece by John Nolte, editor of Andrew Breitbart's conservative Big Hollywood site, declared the movie wasn't for Heartland America: "'Avatar' Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy." On the Drudge Report, the headlines made clear the film was viewed as a misguided stealth missile of liberal rhetoric, not a popcorn entertainment.

On the eve of "Avatar's" release there were more than a few predictions that the film would suffer because of its out-of-touch-with-America message from the Hollywood left. But it was the rage of the right that was out of touch with the moviegoing populace. The movie about tree-hugging aliens just enjoyed the most lucrative third week of release in Hollywood history (it carried the movie to a domestic total of $352 million), suggesting strong word-of-mouth and a considerable number of multiple viewings by some fans.

And although specific audience breakdowns are hard to come by, moviegoers gave "Avatar" a CinemaScore of "A" on its opening weekend, suggesting that nearly anyone with blogger-fueled doubts coming in had them wiped away once they saw the film.

One reason for the disconnect between the bloggers and the box office may be the simple fact that the movie about big blue aliens didn't feel all that connected to modern-day politics once the spears and dragons started flying. "A lot of people see 'Avatar' as a 22nd-century story and they don't analogize it," Podhoretz said in an interview. "They see that the guy turns into a 10-foot-tall blue guy. Whatever political message in it sails over their heads...If [average] people come out and say this is really vile and disgusting and defames our military and defames our country, that would have a different effect. But no one's really saying that."

Sometimes politics sit right next to moviegoers when they visit a darkened theater. Six years ago, two mega-hits brought out distinctly different audiences, as liberals turned out by the millions for Michael Moore's anti-Bush screed "Fahrenheit 9/11" and a Christian base drove "The Passion of the Christ" to a major success that morphed at times into a polarizing debate on religion in American.

"Avatar," though, is a film about pure adventure and otherworldly escape and, in terms of spectacle, the sci-fi epic is being hailed by many as a must-see masterpiece -- the politics don't seem to matter much. "People watch Fox News or listen to NPR because of what it says, and what it says about them," says Syracuse University professor Bob Thompson. "What 'Avatar' shows is that people don't make decisions about blockbusters that way."

Perhaps the closest parallel is "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace," another blockbuster with some political subtext amid its space travels -- but that movie drew people in with its built-in history, not its word-of-mouth and certainly not its reviews. "Avatar" is rolling along strongly thanks to its visual successes and, in a wry twist, the marketing and advertising by 20th Century Fox. "People are receptive to this message of anti-corporate imperialism," Thompson says. "But they're receptive to it precisely because of a big corporation's brilliant marketing machine."

-- Steven Zeitchik

Top photo: James Cameron. Credit: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times. Middle and bottom photos: Scenes from the movie "Avatar." Credit: 20th Century Fox

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REVIEW

Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin has reviewed the new book from Joe Sacco and found that it doesn't answer the big questions about the Middle East and that may be its biggest strength.

 
"Footnotes in Gaza" is not a sequel to his 1996 book "Palestine," although it's tempting to read it as such. Both are works of comic-book journalism that take place in the occupied territories and offer a ground's-eye-view of situations that seem too big, too incomprehensible for us to wrap our minds around. But while "Palestine" is a portrait of its moment, an account of Sacco's visit to the West Bank and Gaza during the early 1990s, "Footnotes in Gaza" is a more expansive effort. Built around two forgotten incidents (the 1956 mass killings of Palestinians in Rafah and Khan Younis), it is a book that digs deep, exploring the relationship of past and present, memory and experience -- rigorously reported yet always aware of the elusive nature of testimony, the way that stories solidify and harden over time.

This is especially true in the Middle East, where battles get fought again and again and the personal is the political in a way that we in the United States can never truly understand. "As someone in Gaza told me," Sacco writes in a brief foreword, " 'events are continuous.' Palestinians never seem to have the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next one is upon them." This is a key idea, and it's essential to "Footnotes in Gaza," with its uneasy balance between history and forgetting, between the power of knowing and the futility of the past.

Throughout the book, Sacco shows how much and how little things have changed by the use of what we might call time-fades: paired images that evoke a scene in the 1950s, followed by the same scene in the present day. The most striking of these comes at the climax of his account of the Khan Younis killings, in which he offers side-by-side illustrations, the first showing bodies piled against "the ruins of the 14th century castle, which now forms one side of the town square," the second featuring the same castle half a century later, its walls festooned with handbills and graffiti, cars in a crowded row where the bodies once had been. Time marches on, Sacco means to tell us, and the past is only prologue if we pay attention to what it says. Yet even in a place so bound up by history, "[w]hat good would tending to history do . . . when [people] were under attack and their homes were being demolished now?"

Here we have the central conundrum of "Footnotes in Gaza," which moves back and forth from the furious weight of history to the hopelessness of the present day. By way of emphasis, Sacco focuses -- as he did in "Palestine" and in his Bosnian war book "Safe Area Gorazde" -- on individuals, while engaging in his own form of immersion journalism. In Rafah, he takes an apartment in the center of the refugee camp, against the wishes of his Palestinian guides. One, a resistance fighter named Khaled, tells him he might come under suspicion. "The camp has areas of resistance," he says. "It's better that you stay in a place Hani [Sacco's protector] suggests."

That's a small moment, but an important one, for it suggests the larger scope of Sacco's project, which is to humanize the situation (and its players) by placing himself directly in its midst. Khaled is a former Fatah member who now belongs to the armed Popular Resistance Committees, but he lives by a certain code. When he and some compatriots hear a sheik exhorting boys to rise up against the Israelis, they are sickened by the cavalier waste of lives. "I've heard him argue against suicide attacks on civilians," Sacco writes of Khaled. "I've heard him advocate a two-state solution. I've heard him say he would be willing to cede his 'right of return' as a refugee for a chance to raise his family in peace." And yet, Khaled also acknowledges that he is a killer, that "killing is not a huge thing for me." It is in highlighting such apparently irreconcilable contradictions that Sacco brings the conflict down to the most human level, allowing us to imagine our way inside it, to make the desperation he discovers in Gaza, in some small way, our own.

The knock, of course, is that Sacco is in with the very people about whom he's reporting, which colors his perspective in unsettling ways. That's true, in one sense, but the take-away is more important than any bias and, regardless, his sympathies are not so easily categorized. Yes, he is on the side of the colonized over the colonizers, and yes, his book is built around a pair of Israeli atrocities, obscured by time though they might be. But his inquiry has more to do with the intractability of the situation than with any ideology or intent.

Nowhere is this as clear as when Sacco reproduces a eulogy for a kibbutznik killed by Palestinian infiltrators, delivered in 1956 by Moshe Dayan. "Let us not today cast blame on the murderers," Dayan notes. "What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home." It's a stunningly empathetic statement -- perhaps the most empathetic statement in the book -- and it stands as an epitaph, not just for the dead of Rafah or Khan Younis, but also for everyone caught up in the endless turmoil of the Gaza Strip. Fittingly, it is Khaled who offers the Palestinian counterpoint. "It's not a matter of victory," he says in the closing pages. "It's a matter of resisting till the end." His posture, slumped, resigned, his face marked with sadness, tells us all we need to know about the toll.

Ultimately, that toll is what links past and present -- and perhaps Palestinian and Israeli. After all, as Sacco acknowledges, the Israelis have been victims of atrocities, as well. What is the value of history in such a landscape? How do we make sense of where we are? These are the primary questions raised by "Footnotes in Gaza," and it is to Sacco's credit as an artist and a journalist that he proposes no easy answers -- nor, indeed, any answers at all.

-- David L. Ulin

Crumb gets biblical but had "no intention to ridicule"

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Art Spiegelman's grim psychedelic years

Spiegelman: "As soon as you try to tell the truth, you're always lying"

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Image credits: Illustrations by Joe Sacco. "Footnotes in Gaza" published by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co.
 

Marcus Brogdan, in London and writing for the Associated Press, delves into the comics and controversy of the great Joe Sacco, who has a gift for cartooning-as-journalism but a subject matter and subjectivity that add up to a talent for trouble. Sacco's latest release, "Footnotes in Gaza," has already become a bookshelf lightning rod.

Fans say graphic novelist Joe Sacco has set new standards for the use of the comic book as a documentary medium. Detractors say his portrayals of the Palestinian conflict are filled with distortion, bias and hyperbole.

One thing is certain — the award-winning author of “Palestine” leaves few readers indifferent.

Sacco's work has more in common with gonzo journalism than your Sunday comic strip: He travels to the world's hot spots, from Iraq to Gaza to Sarajevo, immerses himself in the lives of ordinary people and sets out to depict their harsh realities — in unflinching ink and paper.

One of his biggest supporters is award-winning Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman, who directed the 2008 Golden Globe-winning cartoon documentary “Waltz With Bashir.”

“Whenever I'm asked about animation that influences me, I would say it's more graphic novels. A tremendous influence on me has been Sacco's 'Palestine,' his work on Bosnia and then Art Spiegelman's 'Maus,' " he said in a telephone interview.

“His work quite simply reflects reality.”

The American Maltese artist's latest book, “Footnotes in Gaza,” chronicles two episodes in 1956 in which a U.N. report filed Dec. 15, 1956, said a total of 386 civilians were shot dead by Israeli soldiers — events Sacco said had been “virtually airbrushed from history because they have been ignored by the mainstream media."

Israeli historians dispute these figures.

“It's a big exaggeration,” said Meir Pail, a leading Israeli military historian and leftist politician. “There was never a killing of such a degree. Nobody was murdered. I was there. I don't know of any massacre.”

Sacco's passion for the Palestinian cause has opened him up to accusations of bias.

Jose Alaniz, from the University of Washington's Department of Comparative Literature, said Sacco manipulated the reader in "all sorts of subtle ways."

“Very often he will pick angles in his artwork that favor the perspective of the victim: He'll draw Israeli soldiers or settlers from a low perspective to make them more menacing and towering."

Alaniz also said Sacco drew children “in such a way to make them seem more victimized.”

Sacco himself admits he takes sides.

“I don't believe in objectivity as it's practiced in American journalism. I'm not anti-Israeli. ... It's just I very much believe in getting across the Palestinian point of view,” he said. ...

In “Palestine,” which won the 1996 National Book Award, Sacco reported on the lives of West Bank and Gaza inhabitants in the early 1990s. “Safe Area Gorazde,” which won the 2001 Eisner Award for best original graphic novel, describes his experiences in Bosnia in 1995 and '96.

Sacco has been lauded by Edward Said, the renowned literary scholar and Palestinian rights spokesman, who said in his foreword to “Palestine”: “With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.”

“Footnotes” sees Sacco's cartoon self, with the now-trademark nondescript owlishly bespectacled eyes, plunge into the squalid trash-strewn, raw concrete alleys of Rafah and its neighboring town of Khan Younis.

Sacco draws narrow streets crowded with prying schoolchildren and unemployed men. His desperate characters — fugitives, widows and sheiks — mix long-past fact with fiction.

“What I show in the book is that this massacre is just one element of Palestinian history ... and that people are confused about which event, what year they are talking about,” he said. “Palestinians never seem to have had the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next is upon them.”

Sacco said in doing so he was trying to create a balance to what he called the United States' pro-Israeli bias. A scene in “Palestine” shows an Israeli woman asking: “Shouldn't you be seeing our side of the story?” Sacco's cartoon self replies: “I've heard nothing but the Israeli side most of my life.”

Sacco says he puts himself into his comics because he wants his readers to see and feel what he does.

“I'm not pretending to be the all-powerful, all-knowing journalist god. ... I'm an individual who reacts to people who are sometimes afraid. ... On a human level, of course, that colors the stories I'm telling.”

Folman, who both wrote and directed the 2008 animated documentary film about a 19-year-old Israeli soldier still troubled by nightmares about the Lebanon war, says Sacco has brought something rare to the cartoon genre.

“The way he illustrates says everything about the writing — it's so unique, there is nothing quite like him,” he said. “I really admire the guy. ... And I feel from his work that we share exactly the same opinions about what's happening in the Middle East. ... The day will come when I will meet him and hopefully work with him.”

-- Associated Press

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Image credits: Illustrations by Joe Sacco. "Footnotes in Gaza" published by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co.

Dawn C. Chmielewski covers Disney for the Los Angeles Times and her latest piece is on the quest to find the best voice for the artificial Abe Lincoln that will address millions and millions of tourists who come to Anaheim. This is a longer version of the story that appeared in The Times..

It looks like Abraham Lincoln. It moves like Abraham Lincoln. And it quotes Abraham Lincoln.

But historians say it still doesn't sound like Abraham Lincoln.

After a four-year absence, Walt Disney Co. pulls the curtain back Friday on a new high-tech version of Abraham Lincoln for its "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln'' show at the Opera House on Main Street in Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif.

The animatronic Lincoln, incorporating cutting-edge technology that gives the mechanical man nuanced facial expressions, first premiered at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. While Disney engineers spent the past year accomplishing such technical feats as how to coax Lincoln's synthetic lips to purse, they nonetheless left the audio pastiche of Lincoln quotes the figure speaks unchanged.

Instead, Disney remastered the original 40-plus-year audio recordings made by character actor Royal Dano. And Dano's rendition didn't sound much like that of the 16th president of the United States, prominent Lincoln historians say.

"I'm listening to Royal Dano again,'' said Lincoln expert Harold Holzer, who has written extensively on the Civil War-era president. "You know, I am an absolutely committed Sam Waterston man. ... I will take his readings of Lincoln over anyone's on earth.''

Much of what scholars have deduced about Lincoln's delivery comes from contemporary accounts describing a high-tenor voice. ``He often was so nervous at the beginning, he would almost shift up into a falsetto before he settled himself,'' said historian Ronald C. White Jr., author of "A. Lincoln: A Biography.''

The rest is inferred from a collection of Works Projects Administration recordings of regional accents, which captured a kind of the early-mid 20th century patois of people living in rural Kentucky, where Lincoln was raised.

"The very best of the Lincoln impersonators will speak in that dialect,'' said White. As in: Thank you, Mr. Cheerman (not Mr. Chairman).

But other historians note Disney knows how to make Lincoln entertaining.

"What the people at Disney have done, and their genius of sorts, is that they do understand that people going to their venues aren't going necessarily for a history lesson,'' said Thomas Schwartz, the Illinois state historian.

Indeed, the primary objective of Disney's imagineers was to restore the awe audiences experienced in 1964, when they first saw Lincoln rise from his chair to speak.

The engineers and sculptors consulted 26 original photographs and Lincoln's life and death masks to recreate his visage.Then, they captured the musculature of the face using 16 micro-miniaturized motors pushing and pulling silicone skin. Tony Baxter, senior vice president for creative development for Walt Disney Imagineering, said criticisms about Dano's performance are all based on third-person accounts of Lincoln's voice -- no one knows for sure. And while he acknowledges Dano tends not to be as soft-spoken as the president is described, the late actor nonetheless evoked a Lincoln that is ``emotionally right.''

Moreover, past attempts to change the beloved attraction met with fierce backlash.

"We changed the voice in the previous show and we got tremendous negativity, so we brought back this voice which has kind of been the voice of Abraham Lincoln for 45 years,'' Baxter said.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Captain America and Spider-Man meet...Abe Lincoln?

Darth Vader announces "Star Tours" revamping

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Barack Obama and John McCain comics are surprisingly good

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A Tinker Bell movie for boys? Disney hopes so

John Lasseter talks about the backstory of "Toy Story 3"

50 years later: "Sleeping Beauty" star dazzles D23 audience

D23: 'Lost' Mickey Mouse cartoon from the 1950s will be screened

PHOTO: "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln," by Don Kelsen/Los Angeles Times.

A royal pain. That's the best way to describe the last two weeks for Darren G. Davis, the Washington state comics publisher who has gained some minor infamy in the British news media because of his supposedly cruel treatment of Princess Diana and her memory.

The comic book is part of the "Female Force" series of biographies by Bluewater -- First Lady Michelle Obama and "Twilight" author Stephenie Meyer are among the subjects who have been featured. "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling is next up. Despite the ungainly umbrella title of "Female Force" (it sounds like a bad ninja movie to me), these are well-done books that I would (and have) let my 11-year-old daughter read. Bluewater now sells these books through the Jo-Ann national chain of fabric and craft stores -- hardly a merchant of the prurient.

The biggest comic-book sales hero of 2009? Barack Obama 

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Nancy Pelosi and the GOP: It's spy vs. spy, 007-style

"Female Force: Princess Diana" art courtesy of Bluewater Productions

Earlier this year, author J.K. Rowling was given one of France's highest honors when she was inducted into the Legion of Honor by French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysee presidential palace. No surprise, I suppose, considering the fact that Rowling's beloved "Harry Potter" books have sold more than 400 million copies and been translated into 67 languages -- not to mention the history-making film adaptations, which collectively have gone north of $5.3 billion in worldwide box office.

Turns out, according to a new book by a speechwriter during the Bush administration, there was talk of honoring the British author with the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom a few years ago but the idea was a non-starter in the White House. The former administration had decision-makers who spoke up to "actually object to giving the author J.K. Rowling a presidential medal because the Harry Potter books encouraged witchcraft," writes Matthew Latimer, author of "Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor."

Hmm. They gave the same medal to James Cagney and John Wayne without fear of gunfire in the streets, and Charlton Heston got one despite his mixed messages on creationism vs. evolution (sure, he made great Bible movies, but what about that talking-ape film?). My first thought was that Rowling didn't merit the award for the simple reason that, well, it was too big of an honor -- but, really, is she provably less deserving than previous honorees Julia Child, Rita Moreno or NASCAR driver Richard Petty?

Many supporters celebrate Rowling's philanthropy and point out that her works have energized young readers in dynamic fashion in an era when parents had given up hope that their youngsters would willingly set aside video games and television remotes so they could plow through a 759-page tome such as "Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows." Will she still be honored with the Medal of Freedom? The late Ted Kennedy, who was viewed as Voldemort by the GOP, was passed over for the medal during the Bush administration but got it from the next occupant of the White House. Should Rowling be another second-chance candidate?

Take a look at the list of previous Medal of Freedom winners and leave a comment below with your opinion.

-- Geoff Boucher

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STILL WANT MORE?  All "HARRY POTTER" coverage at Hero Complex

Use the Force, Mr. President.

President Barack Obama, light sabre in hand, hosted an event on the South Lawn of the White House on Wednesday with the White House Office on Olympic, Paralympic and Youth Sport, Chicago 2016 and United States Olympic Committee (USOC) to promote Chicago's bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. (Michael Tercha/Chicago Tribune) You can read the related story here.

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The University of Oregon may have lost its controversial first game of the 2009 season on the blue monster to Boise State, but they will be concentrating on a different type of monster soon -- the superhero culture -- as the school plays host to "Understanding Superheroes," a two-day conference on Oct. 23-24 that will discuss the world of superheroes.

The conference will be held alongside the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s fall exhibition "Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of a Superhero" and is free to attend, but you have to register in advance.

Guests will include keynote speakers Danny Fingeroth, Charles Hatfield and Henry Jenkins, while comics creators Kurt Busiek ("Astro City"), Greg Rucka ("Gotham Central," "Whiteout," "Queen & Country"); and Gail Simone ("Deadpool," "Birds of Prey," "Welcome to Tranquility"  and "Wonder Woman") chime in with an interesting panel about writing the contemporary superhero.

With other panels like Being and Super-Beings: Existentialism, Temporality, and Eschatology and Secret Identity Politics: Religion, Ethnicity and Superheroes, this seems like it'll be a pretty cerebral event focusing on the psyche behind why we like comics and other pop-culture phenoms like video games.  For those who make their own comics or may want to be part of the process, it might be a great road trip up to Oregon.  And the Ducks play Washington in Seattle that weekend, so the campus should be in a good mood.

-- Jevon Phillips

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Mark Milian, a good friend to the mighty Hero Complex, has an eye-catching post at our political sister blog Top of the Ticket. In a mash-up of fan-boy, Midway and the Beltway storylines, it seems Mark got a bead on who created the Barack Obama/Joker image that has become a sidewalk-culture sensation. Here's an excerpt...

Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe's Photoshop software.

Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he'd found online about how to "Jokerize" portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it.

Four or five hours later, he happily had his product. On Jan. 18, Alkhateeb uploaded the image to photo-sharing site Flickr (shown at right). Over the next two months, he amassed just a couple thousand hits, he said.

Then the counter exploded after a still-anonymous rogue famously found his image, digitally removed the references to Time Magazine, captioned the picture with the word "socialism" and hung printed copies around L.A., making headlines...

THERE'S MORE, READ THE REST

-- Mark Milian

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Who would have expected the big surprise bestseller in the comics world this year would be a politician? It's been a well-documented story for months that any comic book featuring the 44th president sells like hotcakes, but here's the latest analysis, this time in a piece in the Wall Street Journal, of all places. Here's a short excerpt on the history of this fad:

It started innocently enough. In September 2008, the independent publisher IDW put out comic-book biographies of the two presidential candidates. They were handsome and told in a straightforward manner. The issue about Mr. Obama was friendly toward the senator, but also clear-eyed. It described his use of marijuana and cocaine in high school and even included a section on the racialist musings of Jeremiah Wright and Mr. Obama's consequent decision to join Trinity United Church of Christ. And since there was a companion book about Sen. John McCain, IDW wasn't taking sides in the election.

A month later, another independent publisher, Image Comics, did take sides. In issue #137 of Savage Dragon, the titular character, a green-skinned, super-powered Chicago policeman, appears on the cover with a grinning Obama, proclaiming, "I'm Savage Dragon and I endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States!" Normally an obscure title, that issue of Savage Dragon sold out through four printings.

After the election, the new president put in a guest appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #583. The cover of the venerable series featured Obama in the foreground giving a big thumbs-up to Spidey. Released the week before the inauguration, the issue centered on Spider-Man defeating a plot to destroy Mr. Obama's swearing in. After Spider-Man saves the day, the buffed-up president says, "Thanks partner" and favors him with a fist-bump. Amazing Spider-Man usually sells about 70,000 copies a month. The Obama issue went to five printings and sold over 350,000 copies, making it the best-selling regular series book in a decade.

Funny thing is, this is still going. Wizard even did a whole Obama issue. I'm weary of the commander-in-chief cameos, covers, etc. It had a bit of novelty at the beginning, I suppose, but it turned into a crass gimmick pretty fast, at least in my view.

-- Geoff Boucher

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CREDIT: Obama image courtesy of Alex Ross; Captain America, Spider-Man and Abe image courtesy of Marvel Comics.

I always find something interesting on Heidi MacDonald's fine blog The Beat and today it was a link to a new Art Spiegelman piece that'd I'm awful glad I didn't miss. It's called the "St. Louis Refugee Ship Blues" and it ran in the Washington Post, and instead of trying to read the small print below (as if you could) you should go and check it out on that paper's website as a Flash program or large static page. You can find it right here.

 

--Geoff Boucher

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Images courtesy of Art Spiegelman.

Jib Jab does it again...

--Geoff Boucher

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During the presidential campaign there was a staggering amount of fanboy imagery and pop-culture crossover. We saw Sarah Palin in "Tales from the Crypt" and Barack Obama with Vulcan ears. John McCain got his own comic book and we heard political statements (both the heartfelt variety and the winking kind) from the likes of Wonder Woman and Lando Calrissian. Wow, when did the national political scene turn into a comic-book convention?

Well, the election is long gone, but politics never really take a holiday -- nor do politicos ever tire of drafting Hollywood heroes as symbolic messages and cultural shorthand. Take this new GOP commercial that uses a certain secret agent to take a few shots at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi...

Feel free to express your thoughts on Pelosi and the GOP in the comments section (don't ask us what we think, we're neutral -- we cast our vote for pop culture), but before you do that, check out this montage of Bond openings through the years. Now that's something we can support....

-- Jevon Phillips & Geoff Boucher

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Artwork courtesy of Marvel Comics

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"Amazing Spider-Man" No. 583, the issue with President Obama as a guest star, is in a fifth printing now, so over at the Marvel sales meetings I'm guessing the new catchphrase is, "Yes, we can!"

Hoping to get just a bit more juice out of this giddy presidential season, Marvel has announced a special offer to promote Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, the company's paper-free venture that is still trying to find a mass audience. Here's the blurb:

In honor of President Lincoln’s 200th birthday this month, Marvel will release Gettysburg Distress, an exclusive 6-page free digital comic featuring Spider-Man and Captain America as they witness Lincoln’s historic Gettysburg Address. A tribute to the Bicentennial of the 16th President, the storyline -- which is being written by Matt Fraction with art by Andy MacDonald -- will be available online beginning President’s Day, Monday, February 16, 2009.

Additionally, following the milestone 5th printing and unprecedented continued demand for "Spidey Meets the President," in which President Obama joins Spider-Man in "Amazing Spider-Man" #583, Marvel will kick off President’s Day weekend by offering the special storyline -- along with added never-before-seen bonus content -- for free on Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited. Four all-new, exclusive prologue pages have been added to the storyline -- created by the same team behind the original blockbuster (written by Zeb Wells and art by Todd Nauck and Frank D’Armata). The book will be available beginning Friday afternoon, February 13, 2009 at www.marvel.com/digitalcomics/presidents. All five variant covers created for each printing of the Amazing Spider-Man #583 issue featuring the "Spidey Meets the President" storyline will also be available to view at Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited.

--Geoff Boucher

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Artwork courtesy of Marvel comics.

Welcome to Everyday Hero, your roundup of handpicked headliens from across the fanboy universe...

"GRAVEYARD" WINS NEWBERY: Congrats are in order for Neil Gaiman, whose latest work has been awarded the Newbery Medal. Here's the announcement: "The 2009 Newbery Medal winner is 'The Graveyard Book' by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean, and published by HarperCollins Children's Books. A delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing, the tale of Nobody Owens is told in magical, haunting prose. A child marked for death by an ancient league of assassins escapes into an abandoned graveyard, where he is reared and protected by its spirit denizens. 'A child named Nobody, an assassin, a graveyard and the dead are the perfect combination in this deliciously creepy tale, which is sometimes humorous, sometimes haunting and sometimes surprising,' said Newbery Committee Chair Rose V. Treviño." Over at his online journal, Gaiman has a fun account of how he got the big news: "I was not yet sure what was going on or who was trying to do what. It was 5:45 in the morning. No-one had died, though, I was fairly certain of that. My cell-phone rang. 'Hello. This is Rose Trevino. I'm chair of the ALA Newbery Committee...' Oh. Newbery. Right. Cool. I may be an honors book or something. That would be nice, 'and I have the voting members of the Newbery Committee here, and we want to tell you that your book...' 'THE GRAVEYARD BOOK,' said fourteen loud voices, and I thought, I may be still  asleep right now, but they probably don't do this, probably don't call people and sound so amazingly excited, for Honors books....'...just won...' 'THE NEWBERY MEDAL' they chorused. They sounded really happy. I checked the hotel room because it seemed very likely that I was still fast asleep. It all looked reassuringly solid. You are on a speakerphone with at least 14 teachers and librarians and suchlike great, wise and good people, I thought. Do not start swearing like you did when you got the Hugo. This was a wise thing to think because otherwise huge, mighty and fourletter swears were gathering. I mean, that's what they're for." VIDEO EXTRA: Want to see a trailer for "The Graveyard Book" and hear Gaiman reading from "Graveyard"? Go to the end of this post....

JEEZ, THIS GUY AGAIN?: OK, it was cool when there was a graphic novel biography of Barack Obama (especially since it was very well done) and it was fun when Alex Ross drew that picture of Obama in superhero mode. It was also kinda endearing to find out that the 44th president is a Conan the Barbarian fan and everybody certainly got excited when the new president showed up in the pages of Spider-Man but, well, can we just tone down at this presidential fanboy stuff for awhile? Apparently not. There's a fourth printing of the comic book issue featuring the meeting between Savage Dragon and Obama, which I believe was the first comic-book appearance by a politico in a nationally distributed comic book. Matthew Brady at Newsarama has the scoop on it. Considering that Spider-Man issue also flew off of shelves in multiple printings, I'm guessing we haven't seen the last comic book cover featuring the new leader of the free world. I'm hoping for an Obama team-up with Herbie the Fat Fury. UPDATE: Wow, so Eric Larsen, the creator of Savage Dragon, is more than a little miffed at Marvel and says they stole his approach, some of his ideas and a lot of his thunder when Spidey met Obama. You can read his rant here and a Marvel editor's rebuttal here. What's my take? Well I pretty much loathe all gimmicky superheroes-meet-contemporary-famous-people issues because they always read like those old wretched Radio Shack comics with Superman. So I'll just sit this one out...

A "HORNET'S" NEST: I had lunch with some of the Industrial Light & Magic folks at a great place called Magnolia over on Sunset Boulevard and while we were talking about Jim Cameron's "Avatar" we heard a distinctive laugh at the next table -- we knew it was Seth Rogen before we even looked over. I debated the idea of going over before his food arrived and asking a question or two about "The Green Hornet" but I opted not to because, well, who wants to bug a guy while he's relaxing at lunch? Anyway, there's been much discussion of "Hornet" after the strange doings with Stephen Chow who was brought in as Kato, then helped steer the all-action film into a comedy project, signed on as director and then quit that job over creative differences -- but differences that weren't intense enough for him to abandon the Kato role. Got all that? Rogen is the co-writer of the film and the title character and while the project helped him get in trim shape, it's not yet clear what else he is accomplishing with it. (I also heard a random rumor about the 'Hornet' film: Two different people in the industry told me that Adam Sandler has a brief but key role in the movie as a certain surprise superhero...I heard which one, too, but I don't want to ruin it. Sandler and Rogen have another project together as well.) With all the fits and starts it's no wonder we keep reading things like this dispatch from Drew McWeeny: "It looks like 'The Green Hornet' is about to collapse again, and if this particular configuration doesn't happen, then I suspect it never will. Ever since Stephen Chow started to waffle about his participation in the film, I've been hearing rumors that there were major hesitations at Sony.  Then at Sundance, I heard several people say that the film was off completely.  I spoke this afternoon with a source close to the film, and while they didn't call it completely dead, they did say it is 'highly unlikely' that the film will shoot in 2009 at all." [Hit Fix]

LEAPING LIZARDS, IT'S "V": Last month we brought you an in-depth look at the past and future of the classic TV sci-fi epic "V" and here's an update via a blurb in one of the trades: "ABC is flashing the 'V' sign.The network has given a pilot order to a reimagining of the 1980s miniseries about an alien invasion. Written on spec by '4400' co-creator/exec producer Scott Peters, the new 'V' will center on a female Homeland Security agent. Peters is exec producing the pilot with HDFilms principal Jason Hall. Two ABC pilots picked up so far this pilot season are presold titles based on 1980s properties, 'The Witches of Eastwick' and 'V.'" [Hollywood Reporter]

RANDOM  PLUG: I covered the Screen Actors Guild Awards last night and had a great time backstage. You can read the story here if you like that kind of stuff.

THIS JUST IN...SUPERMAN EXISTS AND HE'S AMERICAN: Here's yet another "Watchmen" video for your enjoyment. Considering all the ancillary videos that have been cooked up for the movie (and, of course, "The Black Freighter" featurette) I'm predicting now that the "Watchmen" Blu-ray will be a pretty staggering package...

ON THIS DATE: Comic book artist Silvio "Sal" Buscema is celebrating his 72nd birthday today. Sal got his start in the 1960s as inker for his brother, John Buscema, and Sal came into his own with long runs of work on "The Incredible Hulk," "Captain America," "Spectacular Spider-Man" and one of my faves, "The Defenders." Sal was a utility player in the Marvel bullpen often doing emergency fill-in issues and inking others between doing his own pencil and ink work and while he is considered more steady than spectacular by fans, his style really evolved through the years and his knack for clear storytelling was a key part of the Marvel glory years.

Welcome to a presidential edition of Everyday Hero, your roundup of handpicked headlines from across the fanboy universe...

HEROIC POLITICS: There's a fun historical piece about comic-book characters claiming the White House through the years and it includes an early 1980s Marvel cover (above left) that I had sorta forgotten about and that immediately brought a smile to my face when I saw it. The piece was written by Matt Brady (an appropriate name for someone dabbling in the area of presidential imagery) and here's what he wrote about that "Mr. Rogers Goes to Washington" plot: "Captain America as President was turned into a story for Marvel’s alternate reality series What If? with 1981’s issue #26. In the story, Cap runs as the candidate for the New Populist Party with Andrew Jackson Hawk (an African American Senator) as his running mate. Keeping things real, the 'America-Hawk' ticket ran against Carter and Reagan (both of which had things to say about Cap’s political experience and the trust the public has for a masked man) and won in a landslide. Keeping a campaign promise, Cap took off his mask on Inauguration Day, and got to work -– one of his first jobs –- a comprehensive new energy policy in order to '[free] America from the tyranny of foreign oil.' One South American plot hatched by the Red Skull later, and Captain America is killed by one of his administration’s own solar satellites, but the country is saved." [Newsarama]

WOLVERINE, CONSIDERED: What's up with "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"? There were plenty of rumors burning through cyberspace that the production was experiencing considerable turbulence after the crew and some cast gathered to do reshoots. There was fanboy-press speculation that Fox was "clearly trying to salvage one of the summer tent-poles of 2009" and much handwringing about the fate of the most popular mutant character. So what's the real deal? Sources close to the production tell me the reshoots were scheduled all along but they also concede that director Gavin Hood is reworking some sections of the film to get precisely the right tone for the long, dark tale of the ultimate Marvel Comics loner. So we'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, star Hugh Jackman, known as one of the real troupers of Hollywood, has sought to quiet any fan worries. Jackman sent this note to Harry Knowles: "Hey everyone -- It's Hugh Jackman, sending this note from freezing Vancouver. I have read a lot of your online comments regarding the footage that we are currently shooting and I share your passion for the Wolverine character and the movie -- I owe it all to you guys! I wanted to reach out and let you know that due to scheduling conflicts with certain cast members and location/weather considerations, we had to wait until now to shoot a couple of scenes. Please rest assured that WOLVERINE will be badass and hopefully meet all of your expectations. I am stoked by the positive response to the teaser, which clearly reflects the tone and scope of the film. If you like that, we've got much more in store!" [Ain't It Cool News] Also, here's some Hollywood Reporter-supplied video of Jackman in the reassurance mode...

AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO'S "LOST"? Television critic Robert Lloyd has written some great pieces lately, including a wonderful appreciation of the late Patrick McGoohan and fall-down funny appraisal of the Powerpuff Girls (which includes this line: "From a preschool perspective, the series might be called transgressive, since it is a cartoon in which the characters beat each other up and destroy a lot of property. Collateral damage, thy name is Powerpuff."). And today he has a great take on "Lost" a show that, for him, is certainly living up to its name: "'Lost,' which returns for its fifth season tonight on ABC, is like a troublesome but attractive friend who comes into your house and talks a lot of nonsense that you tolerate because it's entertaining and because you aren't completely sure it is nonsense. It might make sense in some form of the language that you do not personally understand. You can either let this annoy you, or you can try to work out the meaning, or you can just enjoy the flow in a noncommittal way that does not preclude your being stimulated, shocked or held in suspense -- like a fun-house ride. I am of the third disposition, and have also been of the first. (I wager that even people who love 'Lost' a lot more than I do have at times wanted to reach right through the TV screen and give it a good slap.) As to the second, attempting to resolve all its clues, bread crumbs and loose ends into a workable whole is more than my time is worth. More important, it's a drag on the show: The more that the writers find explanations for the myriad strange phenomena that plague the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 -- the surviving survivors -- the less interesting those phenomena become. The mysterious becomes the merely preposterous. The weirdness of a polar bear on a tropical island is more satisfying than any reason you can provide for it." [Los Angeles Times]

ON THIS DATE: It was on this day in 1926 that actor Steve Reeves, who would bring considerable muscle to Hollywood, was born in Glasgow, Montana. After his father died in a  farming accident, 10-year-old Reeves moved west to California with his mother and, in high school in Oakland, developed an interest in weightlifting. After a stint in the Pacific in World War II, he became a pioneer of the nascent bodybuilding scene and then a star of the screen, most memorably as Hercules. He died in 2000. To celebrate his birthday, let's all flex a new muscle today. To see some video of Reeves in action, continue to the bottom of this post...

PRESIDENTIAL PRICES: Everyone knows that President-elect Barack Obama is showing up on the pages of Spider-Man comics, but Troy Brownfield has a look at the resulting collectible stir: "Surveying the scene today, we see that there are presently approximately 1,117 listings for 'Amazing Spider-Man' No. 583. After you get past some of the insanely inflated Buy It Now listings, which includes a $10,000 listing for a SpidermanObama domain name, you’ll see that bidding seems to be topping out at around $86 for a single, ungraded, unsigned, variant copy.  One can find signed copies fetching over $125, or cleverly pre-sold packages of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd variant printings together for more. It seems that while the number of high-priced Buy It Nows have grown, they aren’t moving for, say, $500 a pop.  At this point, the $80 to $90 seems to be the top end. The top sales prices will probably cool off by next week, as people who just want any copy as a 'historical document' of sorts will likely just be happy to own a 2nd or 3rd printing. The speculators have already been in, and, based on Buy It Nows, a number of them will seemingly just be holding the bag. Let’s hope they won’t need a bailout." [Newsarama]

GEEK GIFT ALERT: OK, here's what I want as a gift for my 40th birthday later this year, will someone tell my wife? And also tell her to stop laughing when you mention that it costs $315. This from a website called Red Hot Phones: In the Batman TV show, when Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were in the library in stately Wayne Manor and needed to go into the Batcave, Bruce would tilt back the head of a bust of William Shakespeare. Hidden under the head was a remote control switch that would cause book shelves to move aside, revealing the Batpoles that Bruce and Dick would use to slide down into the Batcave. Once in the cave, they'd change into their Batman and Robin gear, climb into the Batmobile and speed away to save Gotham City. Now every Batfan can have a full-size working replica of the Shakespeare statuette that Bruce used on the show. One of these was used as a prop in the TV movie 'Return to the Batcave.' It was also featured in WIRED Magazine's 'Top 100 Gifts.' The hidden switch can be used to control a door, lights, music -- anything that works on electricity. An industrial-style pilot light shows when power is being fed to the remote power outlet. 16 Gauge wire, 1625 watts maximum, indoor use only. Components are UL approved. The antique bronze-color 'Bard of Avon' is about 20 inches tall and about 12 inches wide at the shoulders." [Red Hot PHones]

SAM ROCKWELL AND "IRON MAN 2": Filming could start as soon as April on "Iron Man 2" and casting is firming up now. Here's the story by Brian Warmoth on actor Sam Rockwell's addition to the Marvel Studios project and the actor mentions that at one point a few years ago he was in contention to be the title character in the franchise: "'We had a phone conversation about it, and then I didn’t hear anything and that was it,' Rockwell told MTV of early conversations regarding the part that eventually went to Robert Downey Jr. One blockbuster film later, the phone conversation was accompanied by an offer to play Hammer, and Rockwell accepted. 'They were like, we don’t have a script but this is the deal and this is the character,' the actor told MTV. Rockwell had plenty of reason to follow the events in Favreau’s film, even if he wasn't cast the first time around. 'I was a fan of the movie,' he explained. 'My girlfriend was in the first 'Iron Man,' Leslie Bibb.' (Bibb played reporter and Tony Stark’s quick fling Christine Everheart.) Mixed signals flew around about Rockwell’s place in the new script when his involvement was first announced, but he acknowledged that he will be playing the part of straight-from-the-comics businessman and all-around bad guy Justin Hammer. 'Yeah, he’s a rival,' Rockwell nodded. 'He takes over all the weapons stuff after Tony’s left.'  However, the 'Choke' and 'Frost/Nixon' actor shied when pressed for any more story details. 'I don’t know if he takes over Stark Industries,' he said. 'I'm not really sure yet. He’s a money dude. That’s about all I can say.' [MTV]

"BATTLESTAR" MEMORIES: Fire up the FTL, it's almost time to jump away from "Battlestar Galactica." Check back here this evening as the credits roll on tonight's episode, which resumes the series and brings us into the final 10 epsiodes. We'll have a big story right here at 11: 05 p.m. West Coast (UPDATED TIME) time but I have to warn you it will be a MAJOR SPOILER. Also, Variety has a big package of reflections on the series with the thoughts of people from various walks of life, among them an astronaut, a U.S Marine, a rabbi and an archaeologist. (And no, they didn't get a toaster repairman.) You can read it here.

JUST ONE MORE "THING": Remember John Carpenter's "The Thing"? There may be a prequel coming: "Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. is in talks to direct 'The Thing' prequel for Strike and Universal Pictures, although we don't have official confirmation. Heijningen has already been attached to direct 'Army of the Dead' for Zack Snyder's Strike Entertainment. Something else we found interesting is that we're told that Van Heijningen is pushing to make the lead character none other than R.J. Macready's brother! As you all know, R.J. Macready was played by the awesome Kurt Russell in John Carpenter's remake from 1982. As of right now this should be taken as rumor as nothing is set in stone. Just some food for thought ... Here's the synopsis: 'In the screenplay by Ronald D. Moore, the prequel takes place from the Norwegian camps point of view. An American scientific expedition to the frozen wastes of the Antarctic is interrupted by a group of seemingly mad Norwegians pursuing and shooting a dog. The helicopter pursuing the dog crashes leaving no explanation for the chase. During the night, the dog mutates and attacks other dogs in the cage and members of the team that investigate. The team soon realize that an alien life-form with the ability to take over bodies is on the loose and they don't know who may already have been taken over.'" [Bloody Disgusting] Want to read about other Hollywood sci-fi remakes and revivals? Check out this list.

ON THIS DATE: Best wishes today to gifted comics writer Garth Ennis who is celebrating his 39th birthday. Ennis, born in Holywood, Northern Ireland, is hoping to make a stir in the other Hollywood with the oft-discussed adaptation of "The Preacher," his hell-kissed epic about religion and violence. To celebrate his birthday, let's all engage in some blood-drenched blasphemy today.

CREDIT: Sam Rockwell photo by Louis Lanzano / Associated Press