Joe’s Comics. And Joe’s Movies. And Joe’s TV Shows: SDCC 2013’s Spotlight On J. Michael Straczynski

We attended several panels yesterday, and will be writing up more extensive write-ups of at least one of them later or tomorrow (Robert Kirkman’s Skybound panel in particular was interesting), but in the meantime, I wanted to put up something that was interesting, but not particularly comics newsworthy.

Every year of the eight we have attended San Diego Comic-Con, J. Michael Straczynski has hosted a Spotlight panel, where he talks about some of the stuff that he’s working on, but mostly spends his time answering any and all questions posed to him. Be they inquiries about the infamous “Spider-Man Sells His Soul To The Devil To Get Younger Poontang” story in One More Day, or the reasoning behind taking on the controversial Before Watchmen books, to whether or not he liked The Hobbit, he will answer any question… provided it isn’t posed by some naive foreigner.

And you can see this for yourself, as we took video of big chunks of Straczynski’s panel this year, and have included those videos here. But now, a disclaimer: some of these videos may or may not have minor hitches in them. I’m seeing them on my two-year-old tablet via shitty hotel WiFi, but then again, on this rotten, overloaded connection (that only cost me $14.95! For 24 whole hours! And, due to the three hours it took to upload a handful of minute-long video clips, prevented me from publishing this last night as originally intended!), Web pages chug when I try to load them in Lynx. So your mileage on a wired connection may vary. If you find them distracting, I apologize.

Either way, you can check them out (and learn his criticisms of The Bible’s literary merit) after the jump.

The Head of The Giant Magic Lizard: Trailer For The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Released

We are in the height of summer movie season, which means that the movie studios, flush with cash and sucking in more every big weekend, are busily humping the beginnings of their holiday movie offerings. Because after all, three or four billion dollars between May and August is nice, but Christmas is in December, and every good movie executive knows that Paco, their pool cleaner, is relying on their holiday tip to make the down payment on the Porsche.

And if you’re gonna tease a future movie in the time of the massive explodo picture, it had better be a big one… and it surely is. The rumor is that, opening up for screenings of Man of Steel, will be the first trailer for the second Hobbit movie, The Desolation of Smaug. And considering that the title of the movie contains the name of a fucking dragon, that trailer had really deliver some giant fire lizard goodness (That’s what she said! …yeah, sorry; even I feel guilty about that gag. Moving on…).

What’s that? You simply can’t wait until the day after tomorrow to lay your eyes on that massive, slithering heat-spitter (Jesus, now even I feel dirty)? Well, I have good news for you: you can check the trailer out right here, after the jump.