• Spiking the Dragon Ball punch:
  I'm no fan of Dragon Ball Z. I love the concept but the actual story has just a few too many of the quirks that annoy me about shounen manga. However, the live-action Dragon Ball movie certainly has my attention now that they've cast James Marsters as Piccolo. Hm, if they put Marsters in green make-up, what do you think the chances are that he'll become the male equivalent of the Orion Green Girl?
  
• VVolverine, W01ver1ne and Logan Bub still stuck with Paragon City:
  Marvel may have gotten a lot of press for their newly-debuted online comics but the silence on the Marvel MMORPG has industry observers wondering if the game is still coming. There's a whole lot of superhero games that were announced but quietly disappeared: Bullfrog's "My Incredible Super Team" and that other game which was going to use the X-Com engine come to mind. I wonder what is it about the genre that's so challenging.
  
• Springfield, yeah! Can you dig it?:
  DVR alert for this week's Simpsons! This weeks episode features the guest voice of Alan Moore. That's right, the one who knows the score. Art Spiegelman and Dan Clowes also appear as themselves, along with some guy named Jack Black. But Alan Moore ... doesn't that feel like the comics equivalent of Beverlee McKinsey recording a performance? Oops, wrong geekdom ... doesn't that feel like the comics equivalent of Greta Garbo recording a performance?
  
• Link of the week:
  This whole Alan Moore on The Simpsons thing has me flashing back to Gail Simone's old column and her parody of romance comics, where she threw Moore into a teen romance story. "Terminator, hit the north..."
  
  Hey when else will I get to make that reference? Besides, if I'm going to have that song stuck in my head for the next week, I'm not going to suffer alone.
  

After years in development hell, Warner Bros. announced a cast for a movie adaptation of Watchmen at Comic-Con International. Watchmen is a highly regarded comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that asked how different our world would be if superheroes actually existed and if real people could maintain their morality if they found themselves wielding so much power and authority.

The story primarily takes place at the end of the Cold War, the late 80s, but also looks back at the history of its alternate universe to see how superheroes would have changed our history. One of the caped crusaders we meet during those flashbacks is Hooded Justice, one of the first masked men to arrive on the scene who, it turns out, was also gay.

So far, Hooded Justice hasn't been cast and hasn't been mentioned in discussion of the film. I hope that doesn't mean he won't appear in the movie. While Hooded Justice isn't one of Watchmen's essential characters, he plays a key role in establishing the bigotry and violent tendencies of another character, The Comedian.

I'm probably suffering from a bit of hair trigger worry, considering that Watchmen will be directed by Zack Snyder, who unfortunately struck more than a few homophobic notes in his previous comic book movie, 300. It's probably worth considering that the 300 comic was also considered homophobic by many, while Watchmen creator Alan Moore has a history of being very gay friendly (he also wrote V for Vendetta). Perhaps, in the long run, we'll be able to attribute the homophobia in 300 more to the source material than the director, but in the meantime it's worth watching to see if Watchmen's influential gay hero makes it into the film adaptation.