Sleeper
Vol. 1: Out in the Cold
Vol. 2: All False Moves
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips
DC Comics/WildStorm

Back in 2001, a funny thing happened. Noir style comics got popular. Sure, they have been around for a pretty long time but I think it hit its peak once noir-esque style writers like Brian Bendis, Greg Rucka, and Darwyn Cooke started to make some engrossing pieces of comic book fiction. And with the popularity came the glut of noir comics, filled with morally ambiguous heroes and deadly femme fatales. Some were good but a lot were not great. The worst part of it all was that with so many books out there, a great book was bound to be lost in the fold. Sleeper by Ed Brubaker (Daredevil, Criminal) and Sean Phillips (Criminal, Marvel Zombies) was one such title.

Though it garnered a lot of critical acclaim, sales for this title was okay at best but because of solid following plus strong trade sales, the entire series is finally collected in two volumes. This writer could not be happy about the situation, though he does have some small nitpicky grips about the new editions [...]

Finding Nemo and Wall-E director Andrew Stanton‘s first foray into live-action film making is still a ways off, but over the past number of months, many exciting names have been cast in John Carter of Mars. The castings have come in interesting succession, with new additions being revealed every month. We were first informed in June that leads John Carter and the Princess of Mars would be played by X-Men Origins: Wolverine co-stars Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins. Next up was the announcement in July that Willem Dafoe was also cast in the movie as Tars Tarkas, a friendly outcast within a species of vicious warriors. In August, it was reported that three supporting roles were filled by Polly Walker, Dominic West, and Samantha Morton, and all was shaping out nicely.

Like clock work, just before September ends, three new names have been added to the cast, and it keeps getting better and better. Disney has announced that the newest trio of faces added to the cast are Thomas Haden Church, James Purefoy, and Mark Strong. [...]

It’s just about that time: Spike Jonze‘s Where the Wild Things Are is about to finally be released in theaters on October 16, 2009. It’s been a while since the trailer was released and our excitement was at an all-time high, so right here and now you can listen to the entire movie soundtrack free online. Even better, while listening to the music that shall accompany this beautiful film, you can also check out a bunch of new images from the movie and its production. The soundtrack contains original songs by Karen O And The Kids — Karen O as in the singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

As you all likely know, the movie has endured a battle to get to our eyes, with rumors at one point claiming that the movie had been entirely scrapped and Jonze taken off the job by Warner Brothers because it was too dark and they wanted it more aimed at kids. Thankfully it was decided that the original vision was obviously the best, and things moved forward as planned.

Where the Wild Things Are is based on the novel by Maurice Sendak about a young boy named Max (Max Records) who becomes angry with his mother and travels dangerous seas to mystical lands inhabited by large creatures known as the Wild Things who decide to make Max their king.

Click on over to the other side to listen to the soundtrack and check out the images. The soundtrack was also released yesterday on CD, MP3, and vinyl. May I suggest throwing on the music before enjoying the pictures. Sets the tone quite nicely. Head on over to io9 for more images [...]

Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
Season 3
Starring Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim
Warner Home Video
Release Date: August 4, 2009

In the past six months I’ve watched two full seasons of Adult Swim’s live-action sketch series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and I’m afraid to say the show is growing on me. Each episode runs barely twelve minutes and the individual skits usually wrap up around the one-minute mark, but there are still more laughs per capita in a single episode of Tim and Eric than in an entire season of Saturday Night Live.

Unlike most sketch comedy series show creators, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim know the limits of the idea that drives each sketch and never wear out its welcome. While I often laughed hard at the show, it took me some time to really understand what it was all about, but now I do. Tim and Eric Awesome Show has more of a Canadian comic spirit than an American one. Each episode plays like a compilation tape of highlights from shows broadcast on some strange alternate universe version of a cable access television station staffed by a freewheeling collection of misfits and miscreants hopelessly convinced that they’re not engaging in amateur night theatrics. The influence of classic Canuck cathode comedies like SCTV and The Kids in the Hall can be seen in every episode and with each season the show continues to improve. The writing and performances continue to wallow in the wildest off-the-wall ideas the show’s cast and crew can conjure up, but as evidenced in several episodes there’s an increased confidence in their willingness to go completely for broke with their ideas [...]

Summit Entertainment has released new outdoor banner art for the three main character groups in The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

Check out the three new banners here below (click images to get the full, larger version).

The new banners for the upcoming Twilight sequel each present a main group from the film: The Cullens, which has the vampire family along with Edward and Bella (Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart) at the forefront; the Wolf Pack, led by Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner); and the Volturi vampire clan, which includes Dakota Fanning as Jane and Michael Sheen as Aro [...]

Latino Review worked that magic that only they know how to work and got hold of a draft of producer Robert Rodriguez‘s Predators script. With this script comes a reveal of full details of the movie, including characters, setting, premise, and possible rumor confirmation. The draft that was read is dated July of 2009, so it has to be the working draft, or at least severely close to it. Be sure to head over to the source site for their great video with all of the details.

The tricky thing in all of this is that it’s through Fox, but the studio does seem bent on making up for the unspeakable Alien vs. Predator disaster pieces. From this script review, we learn one very important detail: it’s built as an ultra-violent, hard R-rated movie, as it should be. If Fox allows director Nimród Antal and Rodriguez to let it all fly free and doesn’t try and impose on them to tone it down for a broader audience, we could be in for quite a treat. [...]

The new Sookie Stackhouse (True Blood) 8-copy Boxed Set has been released and is available for the low price of $37.38 (42% off the list price of $63.92).

Do the math and you know you’ve scored with 8 paperback books for about $4.68 each.

This is the Southern Vampire book series by author Charlaine Harris, which spawned the hit HBO series True Blood starring Anna Paquin as the mind-reading waitress Sookie Stackhouse who falls in love with a vampire.

The box set contains all 8 books to date (see listing below). Harris is also releasing a book of Sookie short stories on October 6 called A Touch of Dead [...]

Kevin Smith is a household name here at Geeks of Doom HQ. He a comic book and movie writer, a movie director, a frequent guest on the podcast of our friends over at Slashfilm, and he attends comic conventions yearly with the sole aim of making a room full of 5,000 geeks laugh for an hour. His commitment to all things geek is beyond reproach. So when our friends over at Titan Books asked us if we’d like to run an exclusive excerpt from his new book Shootin’ the Sh*t with Kevin Smith, as well as a giveaway, I nearly broke gmail answering ‘Hell Yes!’ so fast.

So, without further preamble here’s an excerpt from Shootin’ the Sh*t where Kevin Smith and his daughter Harley (you gotta love that he named his daughter after a Batman villain) discuss the finer points of old school Mix Tapes vs. the new school of iPod culture.

Lastly, check below the excerpt where you can enter to win your very own copy of Shootin’ the Sh*t from Geeks of Doom [...]

It’s been sheer chaos in the world of Disney lately. It began with a ton of exciting announcements out of the D23 Expo, but was capped off with the shocking news that long time and much-loved Chairman Dick Cook was leaving, most likely due to being fired (Read: Unexpected Cherry On Top: Disney Chairman Dick Cook Fired? ‘Pirates 4′ Doomed?!). When this news broke, as you’ll recall, it didn’t take long before Cook’s friend Johnny Depp shared his distaste for the news, and that he now wasn’t so sure if he wanted to do Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — the fourth movie in Disney’s mammoth franchise — anymore.

To add to this madness, a source has told Cinema Blend that while there’s a chance Depp will still do On Stranger Tides, he “definitely” will not be doing the fifth and sixth installments that they have planned for the franchise. It looks like Disney may have to throw a pile of the money at the most popular actor working today in order to will him back once more, but after that, they are saying that they would even go as far as replacing Captain Jack Sparrow with an entirely new character — which would quite possibly be the ballsiest move ever made. [...]

Back in April, it was confirmed that Sin City director Robert Rodriguez was going to be bringing us a new take on the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic Predator. The new vision will be called Predators, and strangely, people were pretty excited about the news instead of the traditional angry response to remake announcements (just goes to show you how much a great and respected director’s name can make a difference). After many rumors swirled as to who would direct the movie, it was announced that it would be Nimród Antal, a semi-newcomer who helmed Vacancy and the upcoming Armored.

Any sort of remake or sequel to a Schwarzenegger movie immediately brings with it talk off the Governor himself making a cameo, but aside from this, we had no actual casting info or rumors until now. While speaking to Punch Drunk Critic, star of the recently-wrapped Machete, Danny Trejo, either shared or let slip that he would be doing Predators next, and that it would be getting started in about a month. [...]

The Michael Bay produced Platinum Dunes horror re-imagining of A Nightmare on Elm Street now has its very own teaser trailer courtesy of MySpace, and it’s something to see for fans of the series!

This new Nightmare on Elm Street is going in what sounds like the best possible direction: it uses the Freddy Krueger who slaughters you in your dreams that we all know and love, but it gives his character more of a story. As you’ll see in the trailer, they’re aiming to portray him as a regular and innocent dude who’s small and fairly insignificant looking and is wrongly murdered by a mob of disgruntled parents. You all know the rest.

The trailer has a lot of good stuff and it looks like it could be a lot of fun. There are some questionable additions that makes it look like it was cut using footage from previous movies including Freddy vs. Jason (creepy-ass children singing; claw scraping on wall), but it all still looks decent. [...]

For the second time in the last year or so, Warner Brothers recently killed off their planned new live-action He-Man movie, which was preferably called Greyskull for a while, and then back to Masters of the Universe. Both moves came as a surprise as, even though it is He-Man, a review of the Justin Marks script by Latino Review claimed that it had a ton of potential and a real Lord of the Rings vibe to it. The reasoning behind Warner Bros. ultimately dispatching the classic property? It looks as if the studio and the creative sides of the project just could not see eye to eye, and decided it would be best to drop it and move on.

Now comes word that Columbia Pictures didn’t wait too long to go right after the property, and at last notice, they are in negotiations to acquire it. If this deal does move through without a hitch, though, there’s a good chance it could come with a price those of you looking forward to the project won’t swallow easily. [...]

A couple of weeks back I was able to talk with Robert Venditti, author of The Surrogates comic book series, as well as its follow up, Surrogates: Flesh and Bone. We were able to talk about not just his books, but also the film adaptation released this weekend starring Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames. Here’s what he had to say.

Geeks of Doom: What was the genesis of The Surrogates?

Robert Venditti: When I was in grad school at the University of Central Florida, I was in a class called the Literature of the Internet, we read a book called The Cyber Gypsies, which was a non fiction book a guy had written about people addicted to the internet, mostly through online gaming, and people would create these personas for themselves, and they would so identify with those personas, they would lose their jobs or get divorced because they would spend so much time maintaining that persona in the computer. So that was an idea that stuck with me, the sort of basic need we all seem to have to be something other than who we are, and that kicked around in my head for a year or two. And then I started to see a lot of shows on TV about people getting radical plastic surgery, like Extreme Makeover, Dr. 90210, and then that idea melded with the idea from the Cyber Gypsies and made me think about what would happen if we take the world now, where you create this persona for yourself on the internet, what if the technology existed where you can create this persona and that could go out into the world and live your life in your place. And that was where the whole idea started [...]

Today’s MP3 album deal of the day over at Amazon today is The Wizard Of Oz: Original Soundtrack for only $3.99.

This deal coincides with the upcoming release of the 70th Anniversary of the film on Two-Disc Special Edition DVD and its first time on Blu-ray with the Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu-ray Box Set (both scheduled for release this Tuesday, September 29, 2009).

The MP3 album comes with 17 tracks, all of which are the original performances from the 1939 classic starring Judy Garland as Dorothy, the young girl from Kansas who one day finds herself in the merry old land of Oz. “Over the Rainbow,” the Munchinland sequence, and “We’re Off To See The Wizard” are among the many songs on the album [...]

In conjunction with this weekend’s feature film release of Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, the fine folks over at Top Shelf have provided us with a few copies of the original graphic novel as well as the recently released sequel, The Surrogates, Vol. 2: Flesh and Bone, to give away to our lucky readers.

Five (5) winners will receive:

• One (1) copy of The Surrogates, Vol. 1
• One (1) copy of The Surrogates, Vol. 2: Flesh & Bone

What do you have to do to get a chance to win? Glad you asked ’cause it’s really easy. Just make sure you’re a subscriber to our email digest, and then go ahead and fill out the handy dandy form below. [...]