One of the booths at New York Comic Con that caught my eye was the one above, by artist Issa Ibrahim, who specializes in (sometimes risqué) pieces featuring comic book characters. "Love Among the Ruins" is not only a take on one of my favorite pictures ever, "The Kiss" by Alfred Eisenstaedt, it brings together two "warring factions" of pop culture -- Marvel and DC. If there's anything we need in our deeply divided country right now, it's seeing a Marvel character (Captain America) passionately kissing a DC character (Wonder Woman).

What the world needs now is love, superhuman love...

Ask any fan of Adult Swim's The Venture Bros. and they will tell you this: it has been a long time since we saw a new season of The Venture Bros. Yes, we were treated to the one-shot mockumentary episode "From the Ladle to the Grave: The Story of Shallow Gravy" and its music video climax "Jacket" last August. But some of us were hoping for a little more following their amazing fourth season finale in November 2010. Well, boy and girl adventurers, we are in luck -- ahead of the fifth season's arrival in early 2013, we will be getting A Very Venture Halloween on Sunday, October 28 at 11:30 PM!

After a smashing panel, which featured vocal wonders Michael Sinterniklaas (and all of his hair), Paul Boocock, and a kickass sizzle reel, I caught up with show creators Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick to see if I could dig some more information out of them after asking them politely to stay a scoach later than they were planning.

So, thanks so much for hanging out! We know that you’re working on fifth and sixth seasons. Has there ever been any talk of anything full-length for theaters?

Doc Hammer: Once in awhile, yes. Nothing too serious. We play "Dream World" with it, but someone will try to talk us out of it.

Jackson Publick: At one point, I think around when the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie was coming out, there was maybe the most serious talk anybody had because they went, “Yeah. We probably only have the cred and the money to make one more, and it really should be you guys. Your show is the most suited to a feature length and that kind of visual experience." That was right about when we had been greenlit for seasons three and four. We were making season three and I said, “Well, let us make it between seasons three and four because that’ll be the best time. And season three will make people go see that, and that will make people go see season four." They said, “Nah, nah, you should make the shows we ordered first, and then we’ll talk." And then of course, it took us, like, three years to make those seasons, and it was never really spoken of again. But we keep getting to do longer episodes.

Doc: [Execs] will happily talk about it, but [they paint] this very grim picture of putting out a movie.

Jackson: [They're] not wrong.

Doc: [They're] not wrong at all. You put all this work into it and it’s all based on opening night. It’s just a movie. If it rains that night, you’re out a million dollars.

Jackson: All this stupid stuff [could happen] that makes a million dollars go down.

Doc: The reality of it is not as much fun as the idea of having a movie out there. With the straight-to-DVD thing, who knows?

You have video-on-demand, it’s accessible.

Doc: Exactly. Something for Netflix or whatever the fuck is there whenever we get around to it. Whatever that crap is.

The kids love it. Have you ever considered crossing over with another show?

Doc: I thought you asked me if me if I ever dipped in cross dressing. [Laughs] And the answer is no, I love men’s clothing. This season, we are kind of getting a little hand from the Robot Chicken people, but in a way that you’re not expecting, but you’ll really love it.

Jackson: We’ve talked with them before about actually officially doing a special together where they stop-motion-animate our characters.

Doc: I still want to. I love those guys.

Jackson: We write for their show. We all are crazy making our shows, and we never quite think of a place to do it or a great idea.

Doc: It might happen some time. It’s four very busy people.

Jackson: Yeah.

Cool! So, did everything go according to plan when you were writing? Or did something happen to the story?

Doc: Oh, it did not go according to plan! It never goes according to plan! We had all these ideas that we wanted to get into the season, and then the season just happened.

Jackson: And then production starts and we haven’t actually finished enough scripts, so then you’re really writing under the gun. Yeah, I think we gave short shrift to some things that we really meant to care more about.

Doc: It’s only so many episodes and so many minutes.

Jackson: What actually would have been our finale is now going to be its own special. There was a story too big, we ran out of episodes. We literally ran out of episodes. So we were like, oh well, shoot, that’s the ninth script. But we want to make this one a big, long one, and we couldn’t actually get the money to do extra episodes, but we already had a slot open for a special next year or something.

Is there anything in particular that got cut that really devastated you, that you thought, "I can’t believe we can’t do this"?

Doc: Sure those happen, like with the Revenge Society... We had all these ideas, we still have them and we’ll move forward with them, but you can’t just drop it in the middle of the scenes and not follow through, so we just kept leaving it out until we could do with it what we wanted, and it never occurs.

Jackson: Sometimes we do, and we’re always dropping hints about things that we may or may not pick up later. We’re always building scaffolding around things, and then sometimes not doing the work.

Doc: Yeah, sometimes when the blankets come down, the scaffolding... it's nothing.

Jackson: Sometimes it will take two seasons before some character comes back. And it’s not because we wrote him out for two seasons, it's because we forgot to write for him for two seasons.

Doc: And couldn’t fit him in the other stories that we had going.

Jackson: And odds are, he was in two or three other episodes that he got cut from, or whatever. I cut one joke this year that I still hate myself for, the one you love.

Doc: I love that joke! That was why I love this script! I laughed out loud for that joke. And I also knew that you and I would be the only people thinking that was the funniest thing on the planet.

Jackson: My favorite joke in a script I wrote, I really liked writing. There was just no room for the scene that it was in anymore.

Doc: And it wasn't really a part of the scene.

Jackson: And I couldn’t put it in any other character’s mouth. It had to be a Hank line. I was so bummed about it. [Ed. note: I am bummed that I have no idea what this inside joke is.]

Doc: Maybe you would have shanked it, just think of it that way. In the booth? Yeah, you would have shanked it.

Jackson: Oh, stop it! [Laughs]

Doc: That would have been funny.

I’ll go through these last questions really quick. Will Dean ever have sex?

Doc: Watch the show!

Got it! Has Brock ever got anyone pregnant?

Jackson: Oh, totally. [Laughs]

Doc: We’ve expressed that on the show before, and we’ll keep expressing it. Brock uses protection when he remembers.

Oh good. Good for him!

Doc: And usually if she’s totally filthy.

And this is the absolute last question: Twins seem to run in the Venture family. There’s Hank and Dean, there’s Rusty and Jonas. Is there any chance that we could ever meet Jonas Sr.’s twin, if there is one?

Doc: We do work with twins, we work with teams, and we work with murdering one of them. So will more twins happen? Of course. Will we see old Jonas Sr.? Sure. Or does he have a twin? Not yet.

Jackson: [Laughs]

Doc: You know. It’s such an assumption that you’re making that we can’t even say no! Who knows?

Jackson: We haven’t written that yet, but we haven’t not written that yet either.

Doc: Yeah.

Jackson: If you actually look into the box, it affects the experiment, so...

Doc: Yeah.

I want to thank Doc and Jackson for granting me a few extra moments this weekend and for ending on a Schrödinger's cat reference! Make sure to catch A Very Venture Halloween on Sunday, October 28 at 11:30 PM EST on Adult Swim, and watch this space for news on the new season!

Among my favorite parts of New York Comic Con was getting to interview Rod Maxwell, special effects makeup artist and a (sadly, former) contestant on Syfy's competition show, Face Off. He's been working with the anti-smoking campaign The Truth to create the Flavor Monster, a freaky embodiment of how cigarette manufacturers target teenagers and young adults by adding appealing flavors to tobacco products. Maxwell's involvement isn't just artistic, it's personal. But we also talk about his awesome makeup skills and his time on the show. For instance: Is everyone really that bad at managing their time? (By the way, in case you've been watching Face Off, his arm is doing great!)

What do you think is the most important element of special effects make up that a regular audience doesn’t consider?

Oh, the amount of time and work that goes into creating this. We do it very fast on Face Off, and it’s coined, at least to us, "Face Off style." But to really do it with precision and refinement, it does take a long time. It is not, "blink your eyes and the mold is made." Or you end up injuring yourself.

So what was, in your career, not just on Face Off, but what was your most challenging makeup?

For me I think my film The Wishing Well, where I played 26 different characters in it. Transforming my face into 26 different people, where there was no similarity, that was the biggest challenge. And I got to play every different character -- different ethnicities, different ages, different sexes, all of that. So that was my biggest challenge, because I like variation.

Where can people get that movie? Is it available?

If you've got an iPad, you can go to TheWishingWellMovie.com and you can download it on your iPad. It's the Wishing Well Popup Movie and Game. If there were more letters I could have put a couple more in there, but that's the iPad one, so you can watch the movie. There's a game in it, and you will pop up behind the scenes.

What else have you worked on that we might recognize?

Well it's funny that I worked on Face Off, because [Face Off judge] Pat Tatopolous, we worked on Godzilla. We weren’t in the same department, but that was probably the thing that ties Face Off together with me. I’ve worked on Godzilla with Patrick. Small world.

What kind of movies have influenced you the most in your design?

I would say originally The List of Adrian Messenger. I think it was made before I was born. That's a spy thriller where all these movie stars are disguised, you don’t know it’s them and at the end of the movie... spoiler alert, it’s very old. They say the movie’s over, but the mystery isn’t. Then all the characters you’ve seen throughout the movie, they take off their faces and it’s Frank Sinatra, Kirk Douglas, it’s just all these people. I think Kirk Douglas is the star.

So would you say horror, or monsters in general?

I would say it’s a little bit of everything, I think any face transformation. I used to love Twilight Zone and Outer Limits where people would have different faces or rip their faces off. There was one... I would love to find out what it was. There was someone who was a disguise person, and at the end of it, in court, I think they give him an injection, and they show that his face is pliable and they squish his face on, I believe. It’s a childhood memory, and I would just love to know what that was. [Ed. note: I'm almost positive it's The Outer Limits, "The Hundred Days of the Dragon".]

A couple of questions about Face Off. It seems like everyone on Face Off really struggles with time. Is that editing? Or is everyone really bad with time management?

It’s not a matter of being bad with time management, it’s actually having so limited an amount of time to do what typically takes weeks to do. Literally, you get the assignment in the morning and by the end of the next day, your molds are made. It would typically take weeks to really do something right with care. You always see me running on Face Off -- that’s because I didn’t want to wait until the last minute. So, no, it’s not editing. If anything, I don’t think it’s ever possible to show how hard my castmates are working.

Do you think that it's really unrealistic to make people like yourself compete in a show like that, with those time limits and constraints? Or do you think it’s a good challenge?

Oh, I think it’s a great challenge, because, first of all, I can go back and look at all the things I created, and I wouldn’t think that that was possible if it wasn’t for being a part of that competition. I typically wouldn’t have taken a break, or thought, "You know what? I’ll put this off until tomorrow," because I wouldn’t push myself to the limit of possibly injuring myself. In this case, you go, "It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity." It’s an awesome challenge. These are things I never would have come up with on my own. So, no, it was great experience across the board.

Obviously I can’t ask you who the winner is, because...

I don’t know!

You don’t know if they’re going to reveal it live! So, you went home on the Kid’s Monster Challenge.

I did.

I think you had a lot of fun with it, and you stuck to your guns.

Yes, I did.

Also, it wasn’t bad. Every once in awhile, it’s not even a bad makeup that sends someone home.

No. I’m very glad that I didn’t go home on something that I felt like I screwed up on. I really did what I wanted to do, and I felt like I really honored [my artist] Sophia’s vision. And then if the judges really had critiques for it, that’s fine.

They were so mixed on that challenge.

They really were. When we were there, they took a long time to deliberate. We were waiting for a very unusually long time.

It was a very fun challenge to watch.

Thank you. It was a fun thing to do, and Sophia cracked me up!

Finally, tell us about your involvement and your work with the Flavor Monsters and The Truth.

Well, Syfy and Truth, I’m not sure how the inner workings went, but it was just a really nice coincidence. When I started The Wishing Well with all those characters, Carol Meikle, who’s a friend of mine, who’s an old-timer working in [the industry], she taught me how to do some of the wig stuff. She had emphysema at the time, and she really supported The Wishing Well. She never got to see the end of The Wishing Well because she died of emphysema. We tried to get her a lung transplant, it was really horrible. But then for The Wishing Well, she sparked the interest of the producers of Face Off, so Wishing Well got me on Face Off, and Face Off got me involved in Truth. Really, it honors Carol, so her passing gets to be brought up in a constructive way that smoking can lead to emphysema, and it’s such a horrible experience.

Despite ending on a sad note, it was fascinating to watch Rod work on his live Flavor Monster makeup and listen to him talk shop. For more information about Rod's movie, The Wishing Well, visit the official site and download the iPad app. For more on the Flavor Monsters, which also features an interactive game, visit The Truth. And I also recommend checking out Syfy's Face Off, one of the better competition shows on right now because, well, you really can't get away with sucking on that show. New episode tonight at 9:00 PM EST, and Gale Anne Hurd (producer of The Walking Dead) is a guest judge.

Thanks for your time, Rod!

(Video link) Right before New York Comic Con's Evil Dead panel (which I could not resist writing about first, because it's what I like to call "my jam") was the panel for the remake of Carrie, directed by Kimberly Peirce and starring Julianne Moore and Chloë Grace Moretz, all of whom were in attendance along with producer Kevin Bishop. I'd have to say that the audience was a little more resigned to a remake of Carrie than they were to Evil Dead (maybe because Carrie has been remade a couple of times already), but it didn't make the discussion any less entertaining.

While this is obviously the same story of Carrie White and the people who drove her to mass destruction, including her fanatical tyrant mother, this intends to be a fresh take on an old tale. For instance, there will be attention paid to cyberbullying, but it won't be the focus. The focus will be the demented, horrific mother-daughter relationship -- and maybe the mass amounts of blood. Peirce, in response to an audience question, estimated about 1,000 gallons of fake blood were used in her Carrie. Moretz, who was covered in it for days at a time, said that it "became something else," even part of the character she was playing. (Bishop was sure to let us know that "no pigs were harmed in the making of this movie.")

Peirce also made a point of mentioning that she referred to Stephen King's novel and not Brian De Palma's 1976 movie for source material; the latter was very supportive of the remake, but the former is notoriously hands-off when it comes to adaptations of his work.

Sony Pictures was kind enough to release the NYCC teaser yesterday, so we can see it in all of its bloody, flammable glory.

Another fun takeaway from the Carrie panel -- the White family phone number. Moretz says that if we call the number, 207-404-2604, you will hear from a member of the White family.

So, who else is going to re-read the book?

I wasn't entirely happy about this new Evil Dead movie in the beginning, especially when I heard Sam Raimi was not going to direct, nor was Bruce Campbell going to be Ash. But then we all found out that Raimi and Campbell would be directly involved in its production and hand-pick its director, Fede Alvarez. It still didn't feel quite right. But after this panel, even if it still doesn't feel like an Evil Dead movie, that doesn't mean it's going to be a bad movie. In fact, I think this is going to be a great movie.

Let's start out by acknowledging how effortlessly and robustly Bruce Campbell owns a large room. Most of the people in the IGN theater had been there for hours (present company included), securing their seat for a number of spotlight panels that day. I don't doubt that some of us were there just to see Evil Dead, especially if we were going to get a wholehearted endorsement of this movie from Ashley J. Williams himself.

After a long standing ovation, Campbell sat down and told us all that we, Evil Dead fans, were "rude, crass, impatient people," and that if we wanted him to "crown" Jane Levy as the new Ash, "I will do it my fucking self." He and Levy discussed the casting process, Levy revealing that Campbell was either trying to talk her out of it or make sure she was prepared to take a Raimi-style beating from Alvarez. (Because what is an Evil Dead movie without its director abusing its lead actor? Not an Evil Dead movie.) Later, he and Alvarez also defended the hiring of Diablo Cody to brush up the script. Alvarez, who pointed out that he wasn't American, said that Cody's work on the script was really to make sure the young American characters sounded right. But also, Campbell added, "she won an Academy Award." So, there's that.

And even though Cody's job was to give the characters some silly quips amongst the horror, it was made very clear to us that this Evil Dead was going back to the very first movie, which was straight-up horror, and not the second or third movies, which were more "splatstick," a phrase coined by Campbell and Raimi. Before the video footage, we saw the full image that I teased above, which is of Jane Levy as a Deadite. Here is the full picture, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly:

This is really the first glimpse of the movie that we were getting, and it was pretty impressive. (As in, the audience made audible sounds of shocked approval.) But it was about to get better, because the footage we were shown had a palpable impact on the audience. This movie is not messing around -- it looks terrifying. We were sideswiped by this thing.

We have the Necronomicon. We have an idiot reading the Necronomicon. We have tree rape. And we have chainsaw. We have a new Evil Dead movie, and it is here to swallow our souls.

After giving a gaspy fan five dollars following a kiss on her hand, Campbell offered a final benediction:

"We don't want to screw this up... I know a lot of you were pissed... I will accept all of your collective apologies."

Legend has it that Bruce Campbell then dropped the mic and vaporized into thin air that day, but I had to scurry away to be on another panel, so I can't say for sure if this happened. But I'd like to believe it did.

Photo credit: Entertainment Weekly

There it is! On the bottom right of this display! Zombie ferret -- and other pets -- are the exclusive offering of ZombieZom, one of the awesome exhibitors on the NYCC show floor! Love them not for being the only place to buy a zombie ferret car sticker, but because they thought to make one at all!

(Video link) One of the really fun panels I attended at New York Comic Con discussed a subject with which I'm very familiar: comic book movies, and being a comics fan versus a movies fan. While I dig and respect comic books, I'm definitely in the latter camp. At the panel Comics Pros and Film Buffs: When Fanboys Collide, moderated by John Siuntres of the Word Balloon podcast, a lively discussion took place on how comic book movies impact the comic book industry, but also some less popular movies based on comic books. Bash Brannigan, anyone?

The 1965 movie, How to Murder Your Wife, starring Jack Lemmon, was brought up by Indiewire's Matt Singer. You never hear about this movie in discussions about comic book movies, but then again, it wasn't really based on a comic. The Bash Brannigan comic strip was a byproduct of the movie, created by Lemmon's struggling cartoonist character Stanley Ford (and drawn by actual comic strip artsit, Mel Keefer) who won't write a plotline for his star unless he can make it happen in real life, which he does. I'm a little ashamed of myself that I hadn't heard of this movie before New York Comic Con.

Also brought up was the work of cartoon artist Frank Tashlin, who created comic strips and worked for Warner Bros. on Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies in the 1930s and '40s before directing movies. He was described by the panel as the Judd Apatow of his day, casting the most popular comedic actors of the time for killer ensembles like Shirley MacLaine, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, plus Jayne Mansfield. In Artists and Models, Tashlin took on the Senate hearings of the 1950s that put comic books on trial, featuring a comics-obsessed Jerry Lewis as a witness -- for the prosecution. While I was a little ashamed of myself for not knowing about How to Murder Your Wife, I am deeply ashamed of myself for not knowing about Frank Tashlin. I'm glad this has been rectified.

The discussion moved from these culty gems to today's blockbusters -- The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Avengers, as examples. With comic book professionals on the panel, including Jim McCann, writer for Marvel comics, his frequent collaborator (Mind the Gap, Return of the Dapper Men) Janet Lee, an Eisner-winning illustrator, and Gabriel Hardman, Marvel artist and storyboard artist for The Dark Knight Rises. The big question: Are comic book movies beneficial or detrimental to comic books? There are many issues to consider besides how many copies have been sold, such as how the movies affected the characters in the comics -- how the Iron Man of the comics started acting more like Robert Downey Jr.'s cinematic interpretation of the character, and how Spider-Man's organic web shooters were suddenly a possibility on the pages after appearing on the big screen. On the other hand, comic books that were spun off from existing series, like Buffyverse, brought in a new audience of TV fans anxious to see what happened after Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air. Those fans are still buying those comics, and those comics continue to be made.

Logical conclusion: the effects of comic book movies on comic books depend on who is being asked about them. An informal audience poll revealed that the majority believe the movies helped the comics. Also consider the fact that this audience consisted of 100 percent comic con attendees who probably have various levels of devotion to comics.

As a bigger fan of movies than comics, with an undeniable respect for the original source material, this was one of the more interesting panels I attended, and I finally feel less guilty about discovering comic books after the fact.

This panel featured a panel of authors -- Myke Cole (Control Point), Thomas E. Sniegoski (the Remy Chandler series), Jacqueline Carey (Dark Currents), Christopher Bennet (Only Superhuman), G.T. Almasi (Blades of Winter), Amber Benson (the Calliope-Reaper Jones series), and Kim Harrison (Into the Woods) -- who have dealt with the most ultimate of moral and ethical dilemmas in their work, but with a supernatural/paranormal twist. It touched on subjects as heavy as individual versus institutionalized violence, the fluidity of justice, and how some actions we see in fiction should just never, ever happen in real life, regardless of having anything to do with superpowers. Cole's unique perspective as an actual war veteran added something extra to the conversation; having seen serious action and been in the battleground of the Middle East, he said that some of the things he's written himself would be pretty much catastrophic if anyone attempted it within the military (like one member of a unit going rogue). The other authors made similar points about vengeance and the responsibility of having superpowers in the first place. Benson even said that characters who wouldn't initially accept being granted superpowers because of the responsibility were the most interesting to her.

But one of the more fun elements of a paranormal/supernatural crime story is how if you kill someone out of revenge, that guy might not be dead for very long. Justice isn't the only thing that's fluid!