Author: Glenn Hauman

Due to, as near as we can tell, Martians deleting folders in my RSS reader, I’ve lost every single one of the links to various comics and pop culture blogs. And we’re going to be spending the weekend rebuilding it, more or less from memory.

So I want to ask you. What news sources should be in our reading mix? What are we missing? Who should we be following? Stuff like that.

Please put your recommendations in the comments, and yes, feel free to hype your own blogs as well. Assume that if I don’t see it here, I may not remember it in the midst of debris.

This RSS image, BTW, is by lifted straight from Matt Forsythe. You should read his comic, Ojingogo, here.

Some days, the headlines just write themselves.

Brad Guigar’s Evil Inc. comic strip was bound to be noticed by the people at Fox Business News sooner or later, it’s their kind of company. So yesterday, Brad was interviewed by the standard Fox News panel of a blond guy, a brunette guy, and a blonde woman on their show Happy Hour yesterday. Since Fox won’t let you embed video– I guess they really need the traffic– you can watch it on Brad’s site.

Now if you want scary, I suspect there are more people reading Brad’s strip daily than are watching Fox Business News…

On this day in 1921 the Great Bird Of The Galaxy, Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, was born in El Paso, Texas. Gene was known as a writer for Dragnet, Naked City, Have Gun, Will Travel, The Lieutenant, The Questor Tapes, Genesis II, Planet Earth, and Strange New World.

Oh, all right, Star Trek, Earth: Final Conflict, and Andromeda. And even a few comics series– don’t tell me you don’t remember Gene Roddenberry’s Lost Universe from Tekno Comics?

He died in 1991 and his ashes are in orbit now, so when we say the Great Bird Of The Galaxy watches over us, we aren’t kidding. Thanks again for letting us all play in your world.

First, we had the worry about if the cops would tell us about a zombie outbreak.

Then it was the math paper prescribing what to do when zombies attack.

Now, we’re getting foreign policy prescriptions about zombie nations written by professors at Tufts.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and he ponders what would different systemic international relations theories predict regarding the effects of a zombie outbreak:

Now, some would dispute whether neoconservatism is a
systemic argument, but let’s posit that it’s a coherent IR theory.  To
its credit, the neoconservatives would recognize the zombie threat as
an existential threat to the human way of life.  Humans are from Earth,
whereas zombies are from Hades — clearly, neoconservatives would argue, zombies hate us for our freedom not to eat other humans’ brains.   

While
the threat might be existential, accomodation or recognition are not
options.  Instead, neocons would quickly gear up an aggressive response
to ensure human hegemony. 
However, the response would likely be to invade and occupy the central
state in the zombie-affected area.  After creating a human outpost in
that place, humans in neighboring zombie-affected countries would be
inspired to rise up and overthrow their own zombie overlords.  Alas,
while this could happen, a more likely outcone would be that,
after the initial “Mission Accomplished” banner had been raised, a
fresh wave of zombies would rise up, enmeshing the initial landing
force — which went in too light and was drawn down too quickly — in a
protracted, bloody stalemate. 

I’m waiting for the feminist theory of zombies any day n– whoops, never mind, Annalee Newitz has been there, done that, and eaten the brains. Maybe we can do something with Sarah Palin…

Finishing off the roll, here are the last of our photos from this year’s Chicago Comic-Con:

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Finally, the (almost) last of our photos from this year’s Chicago Comic-Con:

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Via Cynopsis Digital: Google is now enabling authors
and publishers who sign off under various
Creative Commons licenses to
distribute their works for free using the Google Books platform. The highest profile comic-book that would be immediately eligible for inclusion would be Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now comic miniseries from IDW Publishing.

The
Creative Commons organization has been busy this year launching programs
like the

Attribution-ShareAlike agreement with Wikipedia that enables
interoperability between Wikipedia licenses. This new alliance allows
independent writers, artists and publishers, both existing Google
Partners and
non-partners, to distribute, commercialize and protect the reuse of their
works. It’s a flexible license built for the digital age, with settings
that authorize creative remixes and mash-ups that give credit where
credit is due.

Books that have been made available under a CC license
have been marked with a matching logo on the book’s left hand navigation
bar, allowing users to download the books and share them freely. “If
the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers
can even create a mashup ­- say, translating the book into Esperanto,
donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on
YouTube,” writes Xian Ke, Associate Product manager, Google Books in
a

blog post.

Google says representatives of the
Book Rights Registry
intend to allow rightsholders to distribute CC-licensed works for free,
pending court approval of a settlement. In the meantime, Creative Commons
proponents such as

Lawrence Lessig have make their works available on Google Books using
the CC licenses.