Your Week in Geek #2, July 24, 2010

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to another (day-late) round of Your Week in Geek.  San Diego Comic-Con is in full-swing as of Thursday, and a mother-load of potentially jaw-dropping-ly, world-shatteringly awesome nerd news has been dropped so far this weekend.  As such, you can consider this week’s roundup to be but the tip of the veritable nerdy iceberg, poised to sink the metaphorical Titanic that is your free time, extra spending money, and social skills when the awesome stuff announced this weekend is released to the general public.

The San Diego Comic-Con has grown exponentially.  What started as just that—a comic convention—has now become the launching pad for any and every geeky medium’s major announcements: books, movies, television, comics, video games and even music.  So, as you can imagine, for a newly minted and ambitious column like Your Week in Geek, covering everything that’s been announced in the first two days of the international nerd-gasm that is SDCC is not entirely unlike me trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with a bic pen.

Especially since Brandon wouldn’t spring for me to fly out and cover the event first-hand!  (I mean REALLY, it’d only be like fifteen hundred for the weekend.  Sigh.)

Enough with the diatribe, on with the news!

Movies:

• Gonna start off on a similar note as last time:  Cool movie images for this week include a shot of Mjollnir and Thor from the folks at Marvel:

• Rainn Wilson, Nathan Fillian, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler and Kevin Bacon are the stars of an upcoming super-hero comedy Super. According to Gunn it’ll be a “an effed up, low-rent Watchmen.”  Mr. Gunn, I am intrigued by your premise, excited about the stellar cast, and will be seeing this one opening weekend. (via firstshowing.net)

• I loved Grindhouse.  Loved it.  Especially the fake trailers.  Especially the fake trailer for Machete.  When I heard that they were going to go ahead and actually make Machete¸ I was ecstatic.  When I saw this red band trailer over at IGN.com, I kind of lost it a little bit.  (again:  RED BAND TRAILER.  Totally Not Safe for Work)

• Finally, both some good news and some bad news from Joss Whedon, regarding The Avengers. The bad news?   Nathan Fillion will not be taking up the role of Ant-Man.  I am suitably heartbroken.  The good news?  The movie will directly deal with just how ridiculous a group the Avengers really are.  In Joss’s own words:

“It just really just goes back to the very first incarnation of The Avengers. It goes to The Ultimates, it goes to everything about it. It makes no sense, it’s ridiculous. There’s a thunder god, there’s a green “ID” giant rage monster, there’s Captain America from the 40s, there’s Tony Stark who definitely doesn’t get along with anybody. Ultimately these people don’t belong together and the whole movie is about finding yourself from community. And finding that you not only belong together but you need each other, very much. Obviously this will be expressed through punching but it will be the heart of the film.”

Find video and text of the interview at io9.com.

Television:

• Chuck has been on shaky ground for a while, in terms of ratings, but it’s coming back for one more go at least. It would seem that the next season will be continuing the shows streak of fantastic geeky guest stars, as well, with none other than Linda Hamilton.  When Scott Bakula took on the role of Chuck’s father, it set a pretty high bar for a great guest star to step in as his still unrevealed mother.  Getting Sarah Connor herself, though, is a stroke of genius.  (via Los Angeles Times online)

• I don’t really follow Family Guy, but their recent Star Wars spoofs were quite good.  When McFarlane and company debuted a short taste of their forthcoming Return of the Jedi episode, they admitted to having no interest in spoofing the prequel trilogy.  (story via The Hollywood Reporter)

• The folks at io9.com also have a write-up of the pilot for NBC’s new superhero drama The Cape.  Should be interesting…  The costume is kind of cringe-worthy.

Comics:

• So the only really interesting bit of comics-related news I could scrounge up from the Comic-con news onslaught was that Vertigo comics, publishers of such stellar lines as Y: The Last Man, Fables, Preacher and The Sandman, have announced a slew of new titles.  The Unwritten, American Vampire, Sweet Tooth, and iZombie are all slated as upcoming titles from the publisher.  They have a lot to live up to, that’s for sure.  (Newsarama)

Games:

• If you’re at all interested in the upcoming game Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, in which players can control four separate versions of the iconic character in four separate and distinct universes, Kotaku.com has a slew of news stories, including a hands-on preview, and a look at the store-exclusive costumes.  I’m not sold on this one yet, Spider-man’s console adventures have a shaky track record at best, but the game has a damn cool idea behind it, and if pulled off well, could be well worth the time and money.

• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is getting an appropriately 16-bit, side scrolling beat-em-up game released on Playstation Network and Xbox Live.  For a taste of what’s coming, head over to IGN for some video.

Miscellaneous:

• When I saw this custom Transformer, my inner-child just about burst through my ribcage in a fit of nostalgic glee.  Yes, that’s a giant robot (gestalt or combiner in Transformers lingo) made from the Dinobots.  It’s name is the delicious icing on the nerd-cake:  Extinction.  Yes, it’s not canon, but it kicks so much ass it really ought to be.  There are more pics at Seibertron.com, and you should absolutely check them out.