Author: Glenn Hauman

Mary Lynn Rajskub, known to most as Chloe from 24 but beloved by hardcore fans as Chloe from Veronica’s Closet, is the cover girl on the current Geek Monthly, looking very much like she’s auditioning to take the role of Lara Croft away from Angelina Jolie.

But that’s not why she’s a geek goddess, nor is it because you can apparently talk to her for hours on a mobile phone without draining the battery – it’s that she’ll be appearing in the season finale of The Simpsons this year.

And no, we don’t know if there’s an unresolved cliffhanger in the season finale that leads into The Simpsons movie. We would just never believe that there could be that much advanced symmetry between Fox propertie – hmm. That’s weird. While I was writing this post, an ad for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer just popped up at the bottom of my screen. Go fig.

Man, I’m disappointed in you guys.

We were expecting lots of joke entries from all over the web — you know, Joe Quesada buys Forbidden Planet, Jenette Kahn buys down coat filled with Donald Duck’s feathers, Classics Illustrated adapts Portnoy’s Complaint, Rob Liefeld reads an anatomy textbook — but no. Nothing from the regular comics haunts.

C’mon, I know April Fool’s day was the same day as Palm Sunday, but we all know it’s all Jews in the comics industry anyway. (And stop trying to convince us that Macdonald isn’t a Jewish name, Heidi.)

Luckily, we were able to find a few items:

• Neil Gaiman on the fast track for sainthood
• Freddie Prinze Jr. cast as the Riddler and Paris Hilton cast as Supergirl
• Pixar doing a live action version of John Carter of Mars
• Americans defeat Russians in the first space quidditch match.
• Captain Canuck killed by an assassin’s bullet

And we tried to do what we could, but sadly, we accidentally put a real piece in with our April Fool’s coverage. We’re sorry, and promise to do less real news next year.

In what is being widely heralded as the only diplomatic success during the Bush Administration, today a treaty was signed between Gary Groth, publisher of Fantagraphics, and Harlan Ellison, professional Harlan Ellison impersonater, at the Portland, OR headquarters of Dark Horse Comics.

"We were glad we could finally bring this conflict to an end," said Mike Richardson, Dark Horse’s publisher. "We found ourselves in the crossfire between the Fantagraphics army to the north and the Ellison guerillas to the south. And even though we were widely perceived as Ellison sympathizers due to our publishing Dream Corridor, we were able to convince Gary that since we had published Harlan’s work in the past, we wanted to throttle him as badly as anybody else. Gary understood that, and that led to our first breakthrough in talks."

Details of the treaty have not been made fully public, but we understand that as Ellison’s forces will be returning prisoners to Fantagraphics on the condition that they also take two of Ellison’s ex-wives and "some big creepy guy who’s been following me around ever since I stopped doing the Hour 25 radio show. Joe Stranucci, or Syzygy, or Sienkiewicz, or something… I never know how to pronounce it."

Dirk Deppey, Fantagraphics spokesperson, has announced now that conflicts have ended there will be a multi-volume set of The Complete Ellison Lawsuits coming out, with the first volume due next April and new volumes coming out every six weeks after. The entire series should be out by 2017.

Variety has a three minute interview with Doug Jones, the man behind the Silver Surfer in the new Fantastic Four movie and Abe Sapien in the Hellboy live action and animated films.

From the warped mind of Jim Macdonald (with, one presumes, apologies to Ernest Thayer):

It looked extremely rocky for the Theban Band that day

Three hundred Spartan willies were advancing to the front.

The untimely passing of Marshall Rogers has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream media, as there have been obituaries from both the  New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Both laud his landmark work on Detective Comics as being a touchstone for many later artists’ interpretation of the Batman.