Who is Mysterion?

In case you missed it, last night’s South Park was pretty hilarious.

They started off by spoofing a bit of Watchmen, then they moved into The Dark Knight spoofing before the re-emergence of the ultra-dangerous villain — Professor Chaos. It’s been a little while since we’ve seen South Park this good, but superhero spoofing mixed with that harsh and patented South Park humor, as well as their always interesting racial silliness… how could it possibly go wrong?

The best part about this episode may have been trying to figure out just WHO Mysterion is. You know it’s a freakin’ cartoon. You know what’s coming. But you just can’t help deducing away and trying to unmask the child hero. Maybe I was the only pathetic soul doing this, but I highly, highly doubt it. I personally had big money on it being either Jimmy, or Mr. Garrison.

If you were one of the unfortunate that missed out, you can always watch episodes in-full online, so we’ve decided to provide the video.

Click over to watch the entire episode right here.

So the Watchmen debut has come and gone and we won’t be seeing quite the same amount of news that we were so used to seeing. Fortunately, this has not stopped the motivated and entrepreneurial Dr. Manhattan from lassoing that moon and moving on to bigger and better things. The immortal blue being stopped by G4’s Attack of the Show to pitch a few ideas for movies that he’s come up with in hopes of storming the Hollywood hills.

Unfortunately, his ideas weren’t quite as good as maybe you would expect from a being of infinite knowledge such as Manhattan. Especially since it’s been 20+ years since the events of Watchmen took place; he’s had plenty of time to brainstorm.

Even while his movie ideas weren’t working out so well, the unstoppable doctor returned with a brand new idea — this time for a TV sitcom!

Click over to the other side to enjoy the video over and over again.

Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic
Blu-ray Edition
Directed by Jake Strider Hughes
Narrated by Tom Stechschulte
Based on the original work by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Warner Home Entertainment
Release Date: March 3, 2009

It would be logical to write off the Watchmen Motion Comic as yet another way for Warner Bros. to cash in on the recent Watchmen movie tie-in craze. That’s understandable, but going on the assumption that anyone putting out a product is primarily looking to turn a profit, what is the benefit of this motion comic and is it worth your time? Let’s find out.

For those of you not familiar with motion comics, it’s an animated version of a comic book that includes a narrative and musical score. So with the Watchmen Motion Comic, you get the original artwork by Dave Gibbons that was in the printed book with nothing changed except its presentation. Panels of art are panned in and out of, and the pieces of each panel are animated, making it look like a crude form of cartoon. A narrator speaks the dialogue from the word balloons while a musical score plays along with it.

Obviously, Watchmen finally came out Friday and it’s doing quite well at the box office. This likely means that all our lovely readers have already seen the movie, of course. But, this does not mean that more Watchmen-related movies can’t show up to entertain us.

New to join the party — we have an analysis of one of the scenes by director Zack Snyder, a new video journal, a new website to check out, and a new video from the viral New Frontiersman website. There was also supposed to be a video of the movie’s ever-popular opening title sequence, but that video didn’t even last a day, so it apparently wasn’t supposed to be online.

The first video is an analysis of a scene from Zack Snyder. The video is over at the NY Times — click over to check it out. It even has an interesting little option to adjust the audio for more or less of Snyder or the movie’s original audio.

Next up, you can head over to MSN for a new production diary. The video is a short behind-the-scenes look with cast, crew, and various other associated people discussing the graphic novel’s real-world impact and how it may be even more important today than it was in 1985.

Click over for video.

Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic
Digital Download
Directed by Jake Strider Hughes
Narrated by Tom Stechschulte
Based on the original work by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Warner Home Entertainment
Release date: July 31, 2008 – February 23, 2009

We’ve been told for the last few years that digital comics are the wave of the future, and whether that involves just finding some way to make them easier to read on a computer screen, or some way to read them on a portable devise, I haven’t found a good platform for digital comics yet (which is not to say it’s not out there.) With the release of the Watchmen movie, DC comics and Warner Brothers have decided to cash in by turning Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ groundbreaking work into what they call a motion comic. What this means is that they’ve put minimal animation into Gibbons’ original art, minimal voice work to read the captions and dialog, and minimal music to set the mood. In the end, what they have come up with is something that fails to live up to the original work, and does not present the work as it should be.