At the Toronto FanExpo this past weekend, Laura Vandervoort confirmed she would appear in a single episode of the eighth and final season of the CW’s Smallville. Television’s Supergirl also made mention that there had been talk of her character once being considered for a spinoff series.  She merely said it didn’t pan out without providing any details.

She did admit to being a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan so working alongside Spike, James Marsters, was a thrill.  When she was just beginning her career, she wrote series creator Joss Whedon about wanting to audition for the show, something he remembered when they finally met.

Smallville, with new villains and the same old romantic triangles will return September 18.

Our pal, Charlie Jane Anders, has a story up at i09 about a couple of sitcoms with a super-hero premise. One (the one we know for sure will be funny, at least based on <a href=”

clip) is from the BBC, titled No Heroics. The claim is that it’s based on Friends, but with a bar instead of a coffee house. The other, Boldly Going Nowhere, sounds a bit more sci-fi, and is the brain-child of the folks who bring you Sunny in Philadelphia.  

Alas, there is no discussion as to the person tending bar.  We have our own suggestion.

Vin Diesel told MTV News that he fully expects to reprise his role of Riddick in two more feature films, possibly filming them back-to-back.

“David Twohy right now is writing the scripts. The only question is whether we take a page from the Lord of the Rings guys and try to shoot the two chapters at the same time. There are two more in mind,” Diesel told the network. “Everyone knows I love the Riddick character and I’m always working on it. It just takes five years to make another one because David Twohy and I are so precious about it.”

He first portrayed Richard B. Riddick in the well-received 2000 feature film Pitch Black. In 2004, he, along with Judi Dench, appeared in The Chronicles of Riddick, which received poor reviews and so-so box office.

If he’s correct, the next Riddick chapter would be out in 2009 but it has yet to be mounted at a studio so 2010 is the earliest a film with this scope could be released. The storyline would follow Riddick, having taken the throne of the Necromonger King and would finally bring audiences to the Underverse.
 

Will Eisner’s final book, Expressive Anatomy For Comics and Narrative, was released this week from W.W. Norton without a lot of fanfare. It would have slipped our notice had James Vance not discussed it at his blog.

Among his comments, Vance wrote, “But the reward was being allowed to pore over decades’ worth of Eisner work, concentrating on it as never before, and learning all over again just what a terrific craftsman he was. Even the pieces which I’d dismissed as lesser work revealed lovely little nuggets of compassion in the characterizations, brilliance in construction and masterful shorthand in the staging. Old school or not, at its best Will’s stuff is still among the few examples in the graphic storytelling field that’s truly for grownups.”

The book completes a series of text books by the acknowledged master of the artform and supplements his 1985 volume Comics and Sequential Art and 1996’s Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative.

Eisner, 1917-2005, was at work on the book when he had the heart surgery that surprisingly led to his death.