This week's links:

—Hey, kids! Watch Green Lantern Hal Jordan electrocute his archenemy Sinestro in a special electric chair in the shape of the Green Latern logo! Jeez, not even Batman has a Bat-electric chair, and he has a Bat-everything with his logo all over it…


—I probably shouldn’t link to a Stone every week, but what the hell, this convention panel coverage by Mr. Tucker Stone was hilarious. In a perfect world, on the weekend of every big convention, Newsarama and Comic Book Resources would be full of nothing but stories like this.


—Thinking about comics based on videogames for that post about Prince of Persia the other day reminded me of a comic based on a videogame that doesn’t actually exist yet, but which I would love to read: Lego Batman. Come on, how much sense would that make? A comic based on the video game based on the toys based on the comics! Mainly I’d like to see it in comic book form because the game looks pretty cool, but I’m videogame illiterate and don't have access to a console to play it on.


—Do you know what this weekend is? It’s Mid-Ohio-Con, one of the two biggest comics-related weekends in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. So naturally enough, I won’t be here—I’m taking a trip to visit my ancestral home that I had actually planned before I remembered that Mid-Ohio is about two months earlier than usual this year. Damn it.

Anyway, it’s not the sort of con that you usually see a lot of big announcements made at, but, because it’s smaller, you generally get pretty good access to the creators there, and there’s usually a lot of good bargain bins to put together runs of cheap, old comics from.

Joe Kubert will be there this year, so you can try to touch the edge of his cloak and see if some of his power will flow into you and cure you, and you can also bug Art Baltazar for a sketch of Li’l Barda standing atop a pile of dead Parademons.

I’m sure Columbus’ own Vaneta Rogers of Newsarama.com will be on top of whatever news comes out of the Con.

As is the tradition before MOC or SPACE, the Panel gang will be throwing a get-together. It will go down Friday night from 8 p.m. to midnight at Barley’s (try the veggie burger). Admission’s free, and there will be a DJ, a cash bar, free comics and a “live art throwdown,” in which creators will do sketches on the spot to be auctioned on the eBay to benefit The Hero Initiative. Directions and contact info and the like can be found here.

Here’s Tom Williams’ flier for the event:



—Super-observant readers with excellent memories will recall I had previously mentioned October being some kind of sketchblog theme month. And yet here it is October 2, and still no terribly drawn superhero jokes. What gives? I’m running a little behind (even bad drawings take a while to draw), but hopefully by Monday (or Tuesday…or possibly Wednesday) I’ll have a new colored pencil-on-index card sketch strip up every day for about a month, in addition to the regular “coverage” you've come to expect.


—Mike Sterling reminds us that the only thing more deadly than Namor, The Sub-Mariner is Namor, The Sub-Mariner with a death ray in each hand.


—I'm kinda glad Newsarma contributor and Best Shots ringmaster Troy Brownfield wrote this article about presidents (real and ficitonal) in super-comics, as I was thinking of doing something similar, and now I don't have to dig through my longboxes to do so.

Among my personal favorite presidents-in-comics instances are Teddy Roosevelt in Tales From the Bully-Pulpit, Abraham Lincoln in The Amazing Screw-On Head and Kyle Baker's Plastic Man (a two-parter collected in the Rubber Bandtis trade), and Bob Haney's ultimate JFK conspiracy theory in the pages of the Teen Titans Lost Annual. Oh, and William McKinley inHelen Killer because how often do you see William McKinley in a cameo.

Oh, and speaking of presidents, it looks like what's sure to be the twenty-first century version of the Lincoln-Douglas debate is about to begin, so that's all I got for today...