Jesus Hates Zombies: Those Slack-Jaw Blues TPB
Created by Stephen Lindsay
Artist: Various
Independent Horizon
Cover Price: $17; Available Now

A zombie plague has overtaken Earth, and the situation has become so dire that God feels he must step in and once again send his only son to Earth to save the souls of those that remain alive. Jesus’ goal is to find a church where a group of survivors are boarded up and are the key to saving the human race. Unfortunately, there are two catches. First, God is unable to locate the specific church due to the evil clouding Earth, and so Jesus must travel the globe until he finds it. Second, since Jesus’ powers on Earth are fueled by faith and belief, and with so few left alive to believe, Jesus is essentially a mortal.

Now on Earth, and armed with a trusty baseball bat, Jesus wanders from town to town, and city to city, looking for this one specific church. He encounters hundreds of zombies, which he dispatches with ease, and deals with worse in the form of those that are still human and driven insane by the walking dead. Along the way, Jesus picks up an unlikely sidekick — a “Bub” style zombie who has retained some slight speech abilities and recognizes Jesus for the savior that he is.

Blasphemy hasn’t been this fun since Willem Dafoe donned the crown of thorns! Pouring from the demented mind of Stephen Lindsay, and assisted by co-writer Michael Bartolotta and a score of artists, this is not Billy Graham’s or Jimmy Swaggert’s Jesus. Our hero here has no time to turn the other cheek, relishes in being able to take aggression out on some zombies, smokes more cigarettes than the Marlboro Man, and isn’t afraid to take his own name in vain. God also gets a rather interesting makeover, as an overweight cigar-chomping gangster-type, who hangs out at Heaven’s Spa, home of the famous “Godly Touch Massage.”

Haunted hotel rooms are commonplace. Google your hometown and the topic and you’re bound to come up with at least one nearby. Usually the back-story involves a visitor or hotel employee who met their unfortunate end on the premises. But that’s nothing compared to the Dolphin’s room 1408. 1408 is the mother of all haunted hotel rooms, having claimed more than 50 “victims,” and looking for more when skeptical and emotionally burnt-out writer Michael Enslin (John Cusack) checks in. Only Stephen King could concoct such a notion, though it is Swedish director Mikael HÃ¥fström who brought the story to the big screen.

The two-disc collection’s edition DVD features two very entertaining adaptations of King’s short story. Cusack is in rare form, showing a wide range of emotions and largely carries the film on his own (and he would have to, considering he is alone for a majority of it). The room itself, however, becomes a vivid character thanks to the quality work of set producers. The limited use of CGI is refreshing, and HÃ¥fström’s vision stays true to the feel of King’s work: one of constant mental unease.

The DVD case includes a debatable quote rating the film as one of the best King adaptations since The Shining. (King himself was unhappy with Kubrick’s film, which itself, is not a very faithful adaptation of the book. I would personally rank The Shawshank Redemption as the best King adaptation.) However, King’s short stories haven proven more successful as films than his novels and 1408 continues this pattern. The changes to the original story are negligible, and a strong performance by Cusack keeps things interesting.

I set out happily on my morning mission to the local Apple store with the intention of coming home with a shiny new-brushed aluminum (one of my VERY favorite aesthetics, BTW), Apple Bluetooth keyboards. Sadly, my happy thoughts of bringing home my new little friend (minus the number pad AND the forward delete button… a personal peeve of mine!) were dashed. They weren’t in stock. I went from the Apple store in the local mall to a CompUSA only to be told the same thing, though the words were slightly different. At the Apple store I inquired about the new Apple Bluetooth keyboard and I was handed a card and instructed to call in a week and “check up to see if they were delivered yet.” At CompUSA, however, the resident Mac-geek informed me that they “hadn’t shipped out to anyone,” and “I don’t know what’s wrong with Apple, people have been asking quite often about that item.”

Well, I was a bit bummed. But after reading the absolutely glowing reviews on the Apple site about the new wired and non-wired alike, and since the keys on one of my keyboards were starting to stick quite a bit, I decided to go for the Apple wired, extended keypad (109 keys, I believe… I’d sit and count them, but…).

Now I know why this keyboard had nothing but positive reviews!

DreamWorks Pictures has released a slew of promo material for their upcoming Farrelly Brothers comedy The Heartbreak Kid, starring Ben Stiller, Michelle Monaghan, Malin Akerman, and Jerry Stiller.

See below for production photos, poster images, and official synopsis, as well as links to the trailer, TV spots, clips, and Web games.

The Heartbreak Kid hits theaters on October 5, 2007.

Trailers

Trailer, HD Trailer

TV Spot # 1, TV Spot # 2, TV Spot # 3

Amour: The Amour Anthology #1
Written by Bart A. Thompson
Art by Ezequiel Pineda
Letters by Brant W. Fowler
Approbation Comics
Cover Price $3.50; Available Now

The skinny on Amour, an Approbation Comics title, is that it’s a black-and-white anthology of three one-and-done storylines about dating life in our society today. Billed as a romance comic book, each story is a bite-sized chunk of early relationship stages, i.e., the really uncomfortable dating portions. The anthology format is one that caters to shorter story, limiting the overall scope of a book, generally frustrating interested readers but pulling in casual readers with easy to access stories and fresh characters. Amour is a nice balance of short-play stories generally centered around two individuals in situations that are, for the lack of a better term, called dates. The shorter stories play down Bart Thompson‘s likely weakness with writing longer narratives.

Creator and writer Thompson’s dialogue runs heavy in portions of the book, and the words fail to flow with any sense of thread or continuity “¦ even in the moments meant to simulate awkward conversation, it’s hard to imagine anyone talking in such a way. His characterizations are shallow pastiches, horrible representations of individuals, which might be how he pictures the characters in his head. The title doesn’t generate a fluid context to pull the reader in. Instead, haphazard scenarios are strung together like stale Cheerios on a shoestring.

That’s not to say there’s not room for improvement, because there definitely is. Thompson is able to grasp the notion of the abstractness of human emotion and relationships, but it’s the skill at conveying these ideals into the printed form that poses as Thompson’s biggest hurdle.