Emile Hirsch, the relatively unknown actor, has been cast as Speed Racer in Joel Silver’s live-action adaptation of the beloved Japanese anime from the 1960s.

Hirsch has already been seen in Alpha Dog and Lords of Dogtown and will next be seen in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, opening in September.  He told E!  the film would be “Blade Runner meets Andy Warhol meets pop art.”  No other casting has been confirmed thus far.

Speed Racer is on track for its May 9, 2008 release with filming set for Potsdam, Germany this spring and summer.  Silver has already announced that the film will be intended for all audiences and is aiming at a high octane G-rating.

Our friend Alex Ness asked a lot of people for eulogies to Marshall Rogers, which he posted at his Pop Thought website.

Contributors include Erik Larsen, Paul Levitz, Paul Gulacy, Mark Waid, Alex Sheikman, Kurt Busiek, Christopher Jones, and ComicMixers John Ostrander, Mike Grell, Timothy Truman, and yours truly.

Because we’ve already bought the DVD the first time, Universal today announced the release of a two-disc set of The 40 Year-Old Virgin: 2-Disc Double For Your Pleasure edition.  The new version is timed to hype director Judd Apatow’s new movie, Knocked Up, which is the funniest trailer we’ve seen lately (yes, that includes The Simpsons Movie).

The press release mentions these extras:

• Deleted Scenes — More than 17 additional minutes of  deleted scenes, with commentary by director Apatow and actor and co-producer Seth Rogen.
• Judd’s Video Diaries — Follow the evolution of the film through theeyes of the writer and director as he shares entries from his video diary.
• Poker Game Rehearsal — A rehearsal of the scene that starts the guys on their quest.
• Reel Comedy Round Table
• Cinemax Final Cut — "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"
• Exclusive Raw Footage — The cameras didn’t stop rolling at the end of three of the movie’s funniest scenes –  the poker scene, the waxingscene and Elizabeth Banks in the bathtub.
• You Know How I Know You’re Gay? — David (Paul Rudd) & Cal (Seth Rogen)  with commentary by director Judd Apatow and actor and co-producer Seth Rogen.
• Date-A-Palooza — Additional footage of Andy’s first fumbling foraynto the fast-paced world of speed dating.
• Line-O-Rama — How many different ways can an actor find to deliver a single a line? Find out when the cast otakes one simple line and gives it worlds of meaning.
• My Dinner with Stormy — Actor and co-producer Seth Rogen has an intimate dinner with adult video queen Stormy Daniels.
• Cast Auditions — Actors Jonah Hill, Elizabeth Banks, Romany Malco, Shelley Malil, Jane Lynch, Gerry Bednob and Jazzmun  in the readings that earned them their roles.
• Waxing Doc — Watch as four cameras record what went on behind the scenes when Steve Carell got his chest waxed for the first — and only — time!
• "Knocked Up" Trailer — A sneak preview of Judd Apatow’s newest hilarious and irreverent comedy.
• Unrated Feature Commentary by Judd Apatow and actor and co-writer SteveCarell
• Sex Education Film from the 1950s
• Gag Reel — Enjoy  on-set moments with the cast and crew.

This marks the sixth different version (at least) of The 40 Year Old Virgin available on DVD, with unrated, R rated, theatrical, widescreen, pan-and-scan and HD-DVD releases out there as well. As all seem to feature pretty much the same cover art, buyer beware!

David Honigsberg, the only science fiction and country music writing rabbi (and as such, the epitome of the sort of cross-culture we cover at ComicMix), died suddenly at his home yesterday. He was 48.

Honigsberg contributed a story, "Sambatyon", to the 1994 anthology The Ultimate Silver Surfer. He wrote other science fiction stories over the years, and contributed knowledge of Jewish religion, history, and Kaballah as a consultant to numerous science fiction writers over the years, and was instrumental in writing the first Klingon Jewish wedding ceremony in the Star Trek story, Creative Couplings. He was also active in the science fiction community, both as a speaker on panels and also presiding over numerous weddings of fans.

He is survived by his wife, Alexandra, who has our deepest sympathies. Funds are being raised for his funeral expenses here, and services information will be posted when we have it.

Over the weekend I started to read Will Self’s most recent novel, The Book of Dave. Like so much of Self’s work, this volume could quite comfortably be racked in the science fiction section of your bookstore. Set five or six centuries in a post-apocalyptic future, English culture has evolved based on its sacred text, the recovered letter from a divorced father, Dave, to his son.

It took me the better part of two hours to read the first chapter, which is only 27 pages long. In addition to creating a new religion, Self created a new language, an educated guess as to how English would mutate over the centuries. He thoughtfully provided a glossary in the back, but it still required me to extrapolate a great deal from my limited knowledge of English geography and manners.

This is my idea of fun.

Self is a writer who speculates in the most outrageous ways. In Great Apes, he created an England in which apes are the most evolved primates, and the culture is adapted accordingly. In How the Dead Lives, he imagined that, when you die, you get a dull, clerical job in the suburbs of London.

You won’t find Self’s books in the science fiction or fantasy sections of your bookstores or libraries. You also won’t find Riddley Walker, a book by Russell Hoban that’s a clear antecedent to The Book of Dave (Self wrote an introduction to a reissue of Hoban’s classic in 2002). You won’t find Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, a novel about the pharaohs that includes mental telepathy, magic and time travel.

No, these are “literary” fiction, and they get racked with other novels that, allegedly, belong to no genre, like Waiting to Exhale, Oliver Twist, or Portnoy’s Complaint.

Genre is a useful construct. Sometimes, you want to find a book about a particular subject, whether it’s true love or rocket ships or murder. Putting those books together is a service to the reader. If prose books were racked all together, in simple alphabetical order, you might find Dickens next to the Dummies guides.

That’s about as useful as putting all the graphic novels together.

It’s not as bad as it used to be. Ten years ago, you’d find Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen next to Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury in the Humor section. Booksellers now realize that just because something is called a “comic book,” it’s not necessarily funny.

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For those in the know, the third season of the revived Doctor Who begins in England this Saturday, and to celebrate the event Radio Times – the British equivilant of TV Guide, only, you know, useful – does up the mandatory double-cover feature. Only both covers are use the same photographs, so we’re only reprinting one here.

They also include a listing of the titles of this seasons’ shows, excluding the between-season Christmas horror fest. Fans can tell quite a bit from these titles:

1: Smith and Jones

2: The Shakespeare Code

3: Gridlock

4: Daleks in Manhattan (Part One)

5: Evolution of the Daleks (Part Two)

6: The Lazarus Experiment

7: 42

8: Human Nature (Part One)

9: The Family of Blood (Part Two)

10: Blink

11: Utopia

12: The Sound of Drums (Part One)

13: Last of the Time Lords (Part Two)

The first episode introduces the Doctor’s newest companion, Martha Jones – played by actress Freema Agyeman. She’s the one who is neither Who nor the monster, pictured above. For more, consult Radio Times: www.radiotimes.com. But you would have figured that out.

By the way, from what I’ve seen there’s at least one scene in Saturday night’s episode that would not have been broadcast on American television back when William Hartnell created the role.