What is it with Stuart Townsend and characters with swords? First, he leaves the role of Aragorn early in the shooting of  the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now we hear that he’s out of the role of Fandral in the adaptation of Marvel’s Thor. AP cites that old standby, “creative differences”. Fandral will now be played by Joshua Dallas, who was in the Doctor Who episode “Silence in the Library”.

I can think of a few possibilities:

His swordsmanship isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

Director Kenneth Branagh thinks having Townsend leave the production early is some sort of a good luck charm (see LOTR).

From the Los Angeles Times:

A magnitude 6.5 earthquake rocked the Northern California city of
Eureka on Saturday, snapping power lines, toppling chimneys, knocking
down traffic signals, shattering windows and prompting the evacuation
of at least one apartment building.

All right, which of you geniuses ignored the “Do Not Touch” sign?

Art Clokey, whose bendable creations became a pop
culture phenomenon through countless satires, toys and revivals, has
died at age 88.

Caretaker Chrisanne Wollett Clokey says Clokey died Friday in Los Osos on California’s Central Coast.

Clokey is best known for the creation of Gumby, the green clay character with his horse friend Pokey. Clokey first molded Gumby for a surreal student project at the
University of Southern California called “Gumbasia.” That led to his
making shorts for the Howdy Doody Show and several series through the
years. He said he based Gumby’s swooping head on the hairdo of his father, who died when Clokey was nine.

Clokey also created the moralizing and often satirized claymation duo Davey and Goliath, which became the direct inspriation for Adult Swim’s Moral Orel.

Eddie Murphy restored Gumby’s popularity in the 1980s with
his send-up of the character on “Saturday Night Live” as a
cigar-smoking primadonna. Other late-night revivals followed, including appearances on Canadian late-night television with Gumby being portrayed by comic-book artist Ty Templeton. Apparently, Ty’s portrayal of Gumby ended when he mentioned that one of the books he spent time walking through was Portnoy’s Complaint.

Gumby had a brief career in the comics, starting in 1986 with Blackthorne Publishing, then later Comico and Wildcard Ink.

Yes, you read that right. Gawker, the website that spends an inordinate amount of time picking on the famous, the near famous, the near to the famous, and the need to be famous, has actually defended science fiction convention goers:

The show takes a lazy jab at nerds in Boba Fett, Storm Trooper, and
Star Trek costumes, making theories ranging from reasonable hypothesis,
to outside the box ingenuity, to television inspired, to the completely
ridiculous.

Please. The whole segment is just an excuse to make fun of nerds.

I think we have to redo the Geek Hierarchy chart now.

One of the great symbols of Japan to a Western audience – equal to pagodas, kimonos, and that exaggerated white makeup – is the katana. (Well, any vaguely Japanese sword, to be honest – it doesn’t have to be precisely a katana as long as the profile is right and it’s declared to be incredibly sharp.) I suspect it’s the same for the Japanese themselves – that their traditional swords are one of their internal cultural markers, and part of the standard mental furniture that makes up “Japanese-ness” – since there’s a blizzard of the things in their comics stories. For example…

Crimson-Shell
By Jun Mochizuki
Yen Press, November 2009, $10.99

Surprisingly, this is a single-volume story, not the first volume of anything longer. But it’s paced like the first volume of a longer work, and the ending certainly leaves lots of room for a continuation. (I actually went back to the cover and copyright page after finishing the book, to make sure that it wasn’t “volume one.”) I would not be at all surprised if this was meant as a try-out for something longer, though I have no idea if any more will ever appear.

But, in this book, there’s a young woman, Claudia (also called the Rose Witch), who is the mascot/powerhouse of the secret organization Red Rose – she’s part of its Crimson-Shell division, which I gather is the field operation. The usual mad scientist discovered something called a black rose, which has infected lots of people to different effect: some turn into thorn-tentacled monsters almost immediately, while others keep their intelligence and human appearance for much longer, the better to infiltrate and destroy organizations like the Red Rose – which, as you might have guessed, has a mission to stop the Black Roses at all costs. Claudia is the requisite one person infected with the Black Rose who didn’t turn infected and evil; she instead has unspecified and varying powers over Black Roses.

The guy with the sword is her mentor/friend/savior, Xeno, who is the usual laconic master of violence (with artfully disarranged duster, long hair, and facial scruff to signpost that’s what he is), and he’s accused of being a Black Rose early on in the book. There is also a bewildering array of other characters, many of whom either are or are accused of being Black Rose agents, and that adds to the confusion (as well as the feeling that this is only the beginning of a longer story).

Claudia muddles through the plot without doing much – she’s one of those standard teenage-girl manga heroines, who can’t be too assertive without seeming unfeminine to the audience – and then there’s an ending that leaves a number of major questions. Crimson-Shell would have been an intriguing, if confusing, first volume of a longer series – the reader could assume that all of the unclear details would be explained further along – but it doesn’t work well at all as a single volume. (more…)