You’d think with the release of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 comic book yesterday, we would have had some mention of it on the site. After all, we know that every time we say Buffy the Vampire Slayer we get a lot of extra traffic to the website, and we aren’t above shameless Google-boosting. (Buffy! Buffy! Buffy!) But we couldnt find a timely hook, other than all the traditional press coverage.

Until we came across this: "The American Secret Service have launched an investigation into one of the candidates for the presidency in 2008 – after he pledged that as President, one of his first acts would be to impale President George W. Bush. The candidate in question is Jonathon ‘The Impaler’ Sharkey, and he is running as the only self-described satanic vampire candidate who has so far entered the 2008 race. Sharkey’s pledge to impale President Bush, he makes clear, will only come into effect if he is actually elected to office."

My favorite line from the piece: "But a legal expert is unsure if a case could be made against The Impaler. ‘Under the First Amendment, what it boils down to here is whether or not he’s a vampire who wants to impale the president,’ law professor Neil Richards of Washington University in St. Louis told the Chronicle. ‘I guess the question is, if he’s a vampire, why is he the one staking people? Shouldn’t he want to bite the president and feed on him?’"

And yes, it gives us an excuse to run this Alex Ross painting. Alex Ross! The Google hits just keep on coming!

Last month, blogger Tim Leong reported about South Korean comic author Rhie Won-bok, who wrote in Meon Nara, Yiwoot Nara (Far Countries, Near Countries), his so-called educational comic book series about different countries, that "The Jews are the invisible force that controls the U.S."  At the time, Rhie stood by his words, adding, "I wrote the chapter to let people know that you can’t understand the U.S. without knowing the Jewish community."

Now that he’s actually met some members of that community, he’s singing a different tune.

AP reports that Rabbi Abraham Cooper from the Simon Wiesenthal Center met with Rhie at Gimm-Young Publishers’ offices in Seoul, confronting him with copies of the early 20th century Nazi magazine Der Stuermer to show its similarity to caricatures in Meon Nara. Also present was Richard Choi Bertsch, a member of the National Korean-American Coalition, who condemned the book’s content, as well as raising questions about drawings of African-Americans (something Cheryl Lynn has noted on her blog and at the Black Panel at NYCC), prompting the publisher to pledge an extensive review of the entire series.

"I’m sorry to see things like a frog in a well," Rhie has now admitted, referring to a traditional Korean saying that a frog in a well is unaware of the larger world outside. "In the future, I will write books in a more responsible way."  In addition, Gimm-Young has agreed to translate into Korean a book by the Wiesenthal Center that aims to reveal anti-Semitic mistruths, as well as sending officials to the U.S. to meet with Korean-American and Jewish communities. 

So they can, you know, actually get to know them before writing about them.

First we hear Maggie Gyllenhaal is being courted to replace Katie Holmes in The Dark Night. Now the New York Daily News gossip columnists are reporting that her brother Jake Gyllenhaal is in line to play Captain Marvel in New Line Cinema’s proposed Shazam! movie, based on the DC Comics series.

The paper’s Rush & Molloy column, citing anonymous sources, reported that the movie is New Line’s bid for a franchise on the order of Batman and Superman. "They’re ready to spend up to $200 million to get it started," one source told the columnists.

The columnists also reported that director Peter Segal and his fellow producers want to nab Gyllenhaal before Spider-Man director Sam Raimi does, as Tobey Maguire has said he may let someone else play the webslinger in subsequent installments.

What, Fred MacMurray isn’t available to play the Big Red Cheese?