thanks to scifiwire.com!

Twihards aren’t the only fans so hardcore they’d ink a permanent souvenir of their favorite franchise onto their skin. Fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, Serenity and many other sci-fi universes have also shown off their love with tattoos.

Check out the 25 extreme fans below who put the rest of us to shame!

More here

Wow, that is some dedication and devotion! They are really good and some are quite amazing. What do you think of these fans and their tattoos? Would you get one like these of something you really like?

 Michael Sragow from baltimoresun.com has an interesting opinion on comic books and the role they play in Hollywood!

Let us now praise Comic-Con. On the occasion of the 10th annual Baltimore Comic-Con, it’s time to celebrate comic-book fans and what they’ve wrought. By providing an audience for comic books that shared the concerns and upheld the standards of literary yarn-spinners as different as J.R.R. Tolkien and Jim Thompson, it expanded critical and popular recognition across the board for the richness and pertinence of escapism.

In particular, this audience helped revitalize the fantasy heritage of moviemaking, compelling filmmakers such as Peter Jackson to renew the expansionist and inventive impulses of early masters from Fritz Lang to Ray Harryhausen.

If anything, the comic-book fan base has encouraged moviemakers to grow ever more serious in their action-packed reveries, embracing films as relentlessly grim as Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and as aggressively chaotic as “District 9.” I think those films, and others like them, sink under the weight of their ambitions. But comic-book movies now contain a diversity of pleasures, as endearing and silly as the first “Fantastic Four” and as haunting as the best parts of the “Hellboy” series. I love the way Sam Raimi turned ” Spider-Man 2″ into a romantic opera and Bryan Singer turned “X-2: X-Men United” into a comic-book gloss on overreaction to terrorism as well as a new testament of teen angst.

Read more HERE

I totally agree with this writer! So many great blockbuster movies have come from comics! Hollywood definitely owes a bid debt to people like Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, and the great Stan Lee! Oh and of course the die-hard comic book fans

Do you agree with this theory? Have you read some of these comics. or do you just pefer to watch them on the big screen?

The return of the BSC Beat, our 10-question, topic specific, interview format, and today we are talking Hellboy with Mark Chadbourn. Not Mignola? Nah, we are talking to Chadbourn because he has a Hellboy novel, The Ice Wolves, on tap. Chadbourn is an award winning Fantasy author of such novels as can be found in The Kingdom of the Serpent series- Jack of Ravens, The Burning Man and Destroyer of Worlds– as well as the “mytho-fantasy” trilogies The Age of Misrule and The Dark Age. Below find out where Chadbourn thinks Hellboy’s mythic lineage stems from & who he’s like to see write a Hellboy novel!

What is your experience with Hellboy? Do you recall when you first were exposed to the character, and can you identify a personal favorite arc?

I bought the first Hellboy comics off the racks as they came out back in the 90s. I’d admired Mike Mignola’s art before so I thought I’d give them a try. I was hooked pretty quickly by the myths, legends and folklore that Mike was tapping into – it’s been a long-standing area of interest for me.

What was the process that brought you to writing The Ice Wolves?

The editor of the Hellboy: Oddest Jobsanthology liked some of my fantasy novels and approached me to provide a short story. That tale, ‘Straight No Chaser’, following Hellboy on a tour of zombie blues and jazz clubs, was well-received, and I was asked if I’d like to write a novel. I don’t normally work on other people’s characters, but I liked Hellboy enough that I thought it would be fun. I pitched a story about werewolves and a haunted house, which Mike liked, and off I went.

Read more HERE

I have never heard of Mark Chadbourn, but his work sounds interesting!

Are you a fan of Mark Chadbourn? Will you read ‘Ice Wolves’, and are you a fan of ’Hellboy’?

Examiner.com: The universe created around the character Hellboy is vast tapestry of real-world folklore and mythology seamlessly blended with supernatural mystery and noir detective fiction. Created by legendary writer/artist Mike Mignola and published by Dark Horse Comics, Hellboy is a comic genre unto itself. Throughout his publication history, Hellboy has been thrust into epic battles and esoteric mysteries from interpretations of traditional folklores from almost every continent on the planet.

 Hellboy, himself, is steeped in mythological lore while at the same time creating an entirely new tradition of stories. In a joint venture between World War II Nazi occultists and the mad monk Rasputin, an infant Hellboy is summoned to earth from an unknown, hellish realm.

Read more about Hellboy here.

I have been a fan of Hellboy for years and years. He’s such a great character; so stubborn, smart and sarcastic. The books are chock full of cool supernatural and occult stuff. And Mike Mignola is such a great writer, I would love to read more of his work. If you haven’t read Hellboy, I strongly suggest you go out and grab a couple books. I promise you will get hooked!

Do you read Hellboy?

The very witty Brendon Connelly brings us some exciting news about Gaiman’s much anticipated directorial debut.

Courtesy of his wonderful blog, as readable as it is popular and probably the most popular individual’s blog in the world, Neil Gaiman is currently in London in pre-production of a silent short film for British TV. This will be his second outing as director after the wonderful A Short Film About John Bolton, a documentary (ahem) about the famed comic artist and his uncommonly powerful paintings of vampires. That one had talking – lots of talking.

A Popular Representation of Gaiman's Sandman and Death

Gaiman blogged:

Very quick one just to say I’m in the offices of a film company in London, spending two days interviewing editors, production designers, costume people and the like, for a short (ten minute) silent film I’ve written and will be directing in two weeks’ time.

For more on this exciting endeavor please read here.

I have waited for Gaiman’s Death and Me for ages.  The Sandman Series is one of the most provocative and emtionally stunning pieces of literature of our time.

Do you think under the tutelage of del Toro, Gaiman will achieve all his hopes for his own feature length directorial debut?  What do you hope Gaiman will bring audiences?  Is there anything you wouldn’t want Gaiman to focus on?  Have you seen the vampire based film A Short Film about John Bolton?