So I haven’t read a comic book since I was 12. But I get linked to this parody of the enormously popular Civil War comic and I go read it because I like comedy and I’m a Civil War historian in my spare time. I realized only later that what I took for parody - specifically, this extreme closeup of the female Hulk’s ass…

…is in fact the work of a perfectly serious and well-known comic artist. I mean… they’re literally talking around her ass. So I mention this and the comic fans in my forum reply that this is simply the state of comics these days. Here’s a page from Batman:

You could diagnose a rectal tumor from that shot. What the hell, guys? Nobody else feels… weird reading that? Somebody has started a blog about this, by the way. A feminist. But before we could get too high-and-mighty, the every helpful Jay Pinkerton pointed out that there are two sides to this ass penny:

Thanks, Jay.

So after seeing the Oscar nominations yesterday and realizing that I had not seen any of the five Best Picture nominees, I decided to right that situation and uphold my duties as an entertainment journalist. Tonight I rented Little Miss Sunshine.

First of all, nobody told me this was an almost exact remake of the 1983 Chevy Chase film National Lampoon’s Vacation. I’m not shitting you; we’ve got (spoilers ahead):

A dysfunctional family on a cross-country trip;

A running joke about a wacky malfunctioning vehicle;

A loud, abrasive, foul-mouthed elderly member of the extended family riding along for comic relief;

The death of the above family member;

A wacky misadventure regarding the family member’s body because they can’t delay the trip for funeral arrangements, resulting in them travelling with the body;

A disappointment once they arrive at their destination, resulting in the family acting out and disrupting the operation (and being being let off by the police at the end).

Next up I intend to rent the Brad Pitt film Babel, wherein Pitt plays a father taking his family on vacation in Europe, resulting in a series of wacky cultural misunderstandings.

While we’re on the subject of web comics this week (see below) I ran across this thoughtful discussion where we all shared our favorite Nedroid comics and spoke of their almost magical ability to improve one’s outlook.

The ones I consider Nedroid essentials are Reginald’s Trick, and this one about the invisible rabbit. I also cannot fail to mention this powerful life lesson, with kitties, and my all time favorite that I’ve linked at least three times from the front page of this site.

See? Isn’t that better? There’s bunches more.

Awesome web comic Achewood has gotten a nice mention in TIME magazine, or at least on the TIME website.

I always find myself hesitating to recommend Achewood because it’s so freaking hard to get into; no one episode is that funny on its own. You’ll click and wind up looking at a strip with a guy screaming about moussaka while another guys lays on the floor getting stabbed in the ass by a little machine. You have to read about 20 episodes to get any kind of context for that (starting about HERE). It’s not exactly forgiving. But man, it’s a nut well worth cracking.

Brad Neely, a name you should know if comedy means anything to you, has put out a bit of hilarity called Bible History #1 - The Story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

This is the man who brought us that incredible “Washington” video and the mind-boggling alternate narration track of the first Harry Potter movie (here’s a sample, the whole thing is here).

Over the weekend Blizzard announced their eight millionth subscriber for the hyperaddictive online game World of Warcraft.

That’s $15 a month for most subscribers, plus the $30 or so each of them paid for a copy of the game. That’s $240 million in game sales and $1.4 billion a year in subscription fees.

And think about this. The average gamer spends 21 hours a week in the game world. That’s 168 million hours a week combined. If all of those hours were stacked on top of another, they would still have no height because time doesn’t have a thickness, no matter how much of it you have.

So I run into this striking photo…

…of a 600 year-old corpse that appears to have been frozen in the moment of a terrifying death, probably being attacked by a velociraptor or something.But it pays to read, because this quote from the article makes it a thousand times better:

“The remarkable mummy was found in a hidden burial vault in the Amazon… and has survived thanks to the embalming skills of her tribe…”

That’s right. She didn’t die in that position. The embalmer posed her that way. Presumably because he thought it would be funny. And I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that it’s time for me to change my will.

So VH1 is doing a thing on the 40 Greatest Internet Superstars, and they’ve got the list you can vote on HERE. And there, about half way down the page, is Jennifer Ringley.

If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, consider this. Every time you see some girl on MySpace taking a photo of herself in her bathroom mirror…

…know that Jennifer Ringley did it first. Ten years ago. Back then she ran JenniCAM, a site that’s offline now but forever lives in the pages of internet history as one of the five most important websites of all time.

Jennifer started with a webcam, doing stripshows in front of it. She got some traffic, in the way that even plain-looking girls can get decent traffic on the internet when they’re naked. But one day, she did something that would change the world: she left the camera on.

It stayed on while she did homework, ate pizza, sat at her computer. It watched her in the shower, in bed, by the closet changing clothes before work. A whole life, broadcast to the world, for the first time in human history.

It was reality TV, without the artificial rules and bullshit. Traffic blew in like a hurricane. She was on magazine covers, she was on Letterman, she starred in an episode of Murder, She Wrote. You could see the webcam feed for free but subscribers got extra features, and those subscriptions earned her a six-figure income.

Hard-core fans left her site up, running in a window round-the-clock. They watched her sleep. Granted, the girl didn’t own any pajamas…

…but that wasn’t the point. The point was the rush, the internet rush, the connectivity rush, that godlike feeling of being all-knowing and all-seeing. Looking down from above and plucking the roofs off houses and watching the humans inside go about their business. Long before there was a Myspace, long before anyone had seen a “viral” internet video of some kid dancing in his bedroom, long before Big Brother, there was JenniCAM.

And then, one day, she pulled the plug. She walked away from the fame, from the millions of prying eyes who watched her put on her underpants every morning. Just like that. As far as I know, she didn’t take one step to stretch out her fifteen minutes of fame, didn’t milk it, didn’t jump the shark. She just turned it off and walked away. And that’s pretty fucking amazing.

This two-minute version of Nic Cage’s The Wicker Man is the best thing I’ve seen in my life. I haven’t seen the movie, and that makes it 1,000 times better. NOT THE BEES!!!!!!

We’re still collecting your happiest thoughts. I’d like more good news and fewer cornball jokes but I’m sure we’ll get what we need with time.

Those of you who, like me, have in your lives spent a very long time working on something that almost nobody saw, consider this.

The film Zyzzyx Road starring Tom Sizemore grossed $30.00 at the box office. Thirty bucks. Seriously, go look it up. They either sold three or four tickets, depending on what time of day they went.

I really want to see that movie now.