Ever had one of those days where you black out and suddenly find yourself smack dab in the middle of an alien invasion? If so, then The Advance Team, the new comic written by Will Pfeifer, penciled and inked by Germán Torres, lettered by Tom Orzechowski, and which dropped March 27 is the perfect comic for you.

(You can read a free excerpt of the comic here, if you’re curious.)

[“Believe it or not...I wasn’t always like this.”]

I have a confession to make. *takes a deep breath, whispers a silent prayer for forgiveness from the Geek Gods* I have never read any of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. In fact, I have never read anything at all by George R. R. Martin. I kept meaning to, and every time A Game of Thrones would pop to the top of my “to read” queue something else would spark my interest and back down the list it went. By the time I got serious about reading it the show debuted. At first I didn’t want to watch the show until I’d read the books, and then when I decided to watch the show I wanted to wait for it to come out on DVD so I could watch a high quality version instead of acquiring it by less savory means, but that turned out to be such a ridiculous ordeal that it soured my desire.

So when I was asked to do a review of the new A Game of Thrones graphic novel, out now, I thought why the hell not. I can finally quell my curiosity into a series I’m bound to love anyway based solely on my love of men with beards and chain mail, not to mention that I’d finally stop being the last fantasy nerd left in the world who isn’t obessed with Martin. Turns out A Game of Thrones is actually a good (comic) book. Shocking, I know!

[“Winter is coming.”]

It’s not often that I fall in love with a book. Like my feelings towards people, I’m indifferent to most books, like a bunch of books, really really like some books, but only a select few tug on my heartstrings. That small fraction of my total literary intake are the stories that affected me in some way, left an imprint on me, opened my eyes to a new way of crafting and melding language. They may not change my life or reorient my entire life perspective (although a very, extremely, infinitesimally rare few do — hello American Gods and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), but they dig their claws into me and by the time I finish the last word, all I want to do is turn to the first page and start all over again.

Wide Open by Deborah Coates is one of those books.

[“And it was blinding cold — blizzard cold, hopeless cold, desert cold, blind from the sun so cold just stop please stop. Stop.”]

With “Behind the Dying Fire” we’ve come to the end of another bumpy season of The Walking Dead. There have been a few high points, a decent amount of mediocre points, and a half ton of crappy points. But we survived more or less intact, if not short a few members and a little shy of sane. Much like our motley crew. So, how did it all go down? When the final credits rolled, did the show manage to keep up its winning streak?

[“My hands are clean.”]

The last thing I wanted to do on Sunday night was watch another mediocre-to-sorta-good episode of The Walking Dead. Doing my taxes, rearranging my closet, folding my socks, staring at nothing, really anything at all seemed like a better option than spending yet another hour on this show.

And then came “Better Angels.” Holy crap on a spatula, that was a great episode. Visually, storywise, overarching plotwise, characterwise, everything. We’re talking series premiere good. I have no idea what the heck happened between last week and this week to make this so much better than prior eps, but I hope it keeps happening. This version of TWD is one I can get behind.

[“Shane’s got a way of letting things get out of hand.”]

Hoo, boy. Now that was an episode. Problematic? Just like always. But still entertaining. For the first time this season I wasn’t constantly checking the time to see how much more boring chatfests I’d have to put up with until the bloody, gut-covered cliffhanger. “Judge, Jury, Executioner” was far from perfect — and about a half mile from great — but it was a taught, fraught, and philosophical hour that shook up expectations. Particularly for fans of the comic.

[“Sorry, brother.”]

The downside to being a TV-aholic that everything you read, see, or do reminds you of some pop culture tidbit. If you, like me, happen to be a Simpsons fan, there’s a relatable quote for just about everything. For example, the titular character in The Man from Primrose Lane wore mittens all the time, meaning each time I read the word “mittens” my brain immediately went “I can’t get in trouble at school, they put me in the remedial class. I’m surrounded by arsonists and kids with mittens pinned to their jackets all year round,” followed quickly by “My cat’s name is Mittens.” Of course, none of this has anything to do with the book beyond the fact that your kindly reviewer is a TV geek who should probably spend more time with real people and less time resorting her Netflix queue.

To get to the matter at hand, The Man from Primrose Lane is, ostensibly, a book about a man named David Neff who uncovers a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a vest that is somehow connected to his wife’s untimely death and the unsolved bizarre murder of the be-mittened man. But that’s just the hook, the appetizer, the start of strange, horrible, terrible things to come.

[“The universe is out of balance, David. Don’t you feel it in your bones? This isn’t the way things are supposed to be.”]

Alright, dudes. This probably isn’t going to be the greatest review ever, but I just sat through 3 hours and 13 minutes of Billy Crystal doing blackface jokes and being angry that Viola Davis was robbed, and then immediately followed that by tuning into AMC too early and having to listen to awful Lori’s awful speech all over again. And starting “18 Miles Out” with one of those clichéd “2 hours earlier...” cold opens didn’t help matters. So, as you can guess, I’m in a bit of a mood.

None of that, however, changes the fact that this was a pretty darn good episode. Seriously. They went all Hamlet crossed with Night of the Living Dead on me. Where was all this quality the rest of the season?

[“The pain doesn’t go away. You just make room for it.”]

At this point in the game I’ve given up hope that The Walking Dead is ever going to be anything more than a way to kill an hour on Sunday night when nothing else is on, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want that time killer to be enjoyable. Sometimes fun pops by and kicks some undead butt. More often than not it gets drowned in favor of the Rick and Shane Glower-Off Variety Hour.

But the midseason eps have thus far managed to pair hefty doses of horror movie thrills with the never ending soliloquies on life, liberty, and the pursuit of shooting things in the face. And they’ve done it pretty well. Could it be that Frank Darabont simply wasn’t up to the challenge of running a weekly zombie television show? Maybe Glen Mazzara made all those boring, chatty Cathy eps last year as a way of saving money to go big on the back half of the season. Or maybe it’s just dumb luck. Whatever the reason, “Triggerfinger” was a fine ep that didn’t leave me feeling drunk on rageahol.

[“Do us both a favor and keep your mouth shut.”]

The Walking Dead returned on Sunday after a brief winter hibernation, and I’m not gonna lie, I actually kinda missed it. The show is a massive hit for AMC even if critics and anyone with an internet connection and an opinion are less than thrilled with many of the lackluster scripting and plotting choices — a feat made more impressive given that we’re stuck in an age where networks like NBC struggle to get 2 million viewers for one of the top ten best shows on TV, i.e. Community. But whinging about how Rick is boring and Lori is a soul-killing cipher and Shane is a walking definition of a douchecanoe and why won’t someone give Daryl a spinoff where he wanders the South crossbowing zombies in the face and being gloriously awesome is sooo 2011. With the midseason premiere of “Nebraska,” TWD roared into the Valentine’s Day weekend with an episode full of piss and vinegar. And corpses. So many corpses.

[“Ain’t nobody’s hands clean in what’s left of this world. We’re all the same.”]

Published by Roc, Side Jobs came out in paperback on December 6. It is a fantastic canon-fodder collection of ten previously published short stories and one brand new novellette, all bound together in 418 entertaining pages. A while back I bought the hardcover for purely canonical reasons. Short stories don’t usually float my boat — why have a bite of something yummy when I could just nom the whole enchilada? — but I’ve had enjoyed a few in the past (hello 20th Century Ghosts and Engines of Desire). More importantly, I have a fetish for reading things in chronological order (or, at the very least, the author’s preferred order) and Side Jobs is chock full of revealing interstitials bridging the gaps between earlier Dresden stories and — most excitingly — between Changes and Ghost Story. Meaning one day soon I am going to have to re-read the entire series start to finish while sprinkling in the stories in Side Jobs so I can continue existing in my Sheldon Cooper-esque geek insanity.

[“Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard. It sounds like a bad joke.”]

“Pretty Much Dead Already” is an important episode. Not only is it the midseason finale (yay cliffhangers!), but it’s also the line in the sand between Frank Darabont and Glen Mazzara as head honcho of The Walking Dead. This season has had some high points, low points, and points hovering somewhere just below middling, so I, for one, hope the change in leadership will bring about a tighter ship. Or at the very least finally settle on being adequate and run with it. We won’t get a real feel for Mazzara’s techniques until next year, but fortunately for Darabont, “Pretty Much Dead Already” made for a high note to bow out on.

[“Um, guys, so, the barn’s full of walkers.”]

Despite the disgraceful lack of adequate Daryl-age, “Secrets” kinda worked for me. Let’s be clear here, this was no miraculous turnaround where all the show’s problems were suddenly solved, but I also wasn’t boiling with irritation. There are some good character shifts in this ep. Things we really should’ve been privy to ages ago, but at least now we have some explanation for previously jarring behaviors.

[“You trying to buy my silence with fruit?” “’Course not. There’s also jerky.”]

Remember all that stuff I’ve been complaining about most of the season? Well, “Chupacabra” was a full hour of all the worst bits of the show. Granted, there were some cliffhangers of gut-wrenching proportions (and Daryl is made of win), but those were flickers of light in a silly, insipid world. The Walking Dead wants desperately to be a great show (and, if you go by the ratings, there are many people who believe it’s the next best thing to M*A*S*H), but it’s a long way from “great.”

[“You believe in a blood-sucking dog?” “You believe in dead people walking around?”]

Now we’re back in the game. “Cherokee Rose” was the first really good episode this whole season. It was short on stock horror shocks and run for your life action, but long on much needed character development. It’s hard to get too terribly upset at the death of a character we don’t know anything about, no matter how sudden, gruesome, or cruel his death is (poor, poor Otis), and this episode did a great deal to fill in the gaps. Almost everyone got fleshed out, their recent actions and behaviors explained and justified, and we were even treated with some intriguing new pair-ups — romantic, platonic, and otherwise.

[“Hello, farmer’s daughter.”]

Once upon a time I was a boring girl who liked boring music and boring authors and never did anything outside the box. Despite my passion for Napster, the only music I listened to or downloaded was Top 40 and 90s/early-00s pop music. And then it all changed. In Spring 2005, about 1 or 2 AM, I was pulling yet another all-nighter on my senior thesis. My local radio station had a late night program where listeners tuned up mix tapes and came in to play DJ for an hour, and one of those unknown heroes put on “Coin Operated Boy” by the Dresden Dolls. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my gateway drug, my slippery slope. I fell for Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione. They were like nothing I’d ever heard before. A year later I finally got to see them live when they played a Fourth of July show opening for the Violent Femmes. The arrow struck my heart and I was dead to everything else.

[“So play your favorite cover song, especially if the words are wrong / ’cos even if your grades are bad, it doesn’t mean you’re failing”]

The Walking Dead isn’t just a hit for AMC, it’s a runaway success. The pilot last year roped in nearly 5.2 million viewers and averaged 3.5 million for the season. Season 2 broke the show’s own record with 7.3 million viewers — with a whopping 4.8 million in the 18-49 demographic sweet spot. To no one’s surprise, AMC renewed TWD for a third season. Overall, this is good news. TWD is a solid show with enough action, horror, and philosophical waxing to string along dissenters happy with one of those aspects and unhappy with the rest. For those of us that expect all three, a third season comes with more than a little trepidation.

[“You wanna live now or not? Just a question.”]

Halloween and monsters go together like Batman and Gotham, New Orleans and jazz, SFF conventions and cosplay: you can’t have one without the other. In film’s early days, when filmmakers needed special effects their choices were to paint up their actors with heavy makeup, stick a guy in a rubber gorilla suit, or superimpose some stop motion animation and miniature sets. The undisputed genius king of movable model monsters is Ray Harryhausen.

Born June 29, 1920, Raymond Frederick Harryhausen grew up in Los Angeles, CA with his good friend Ray Bradbury. A school project to build a California Mission (a staple of education every Californian fourth grader does to this day), the occasional trip to see puppet shows at the Orpheum, visits to Southland prehistoric sites, and the 1925  fantasy adventure film The Lost World based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story all had their effect on young Ray. But the biggest impact on Harryhausen came the day he saw King Kong at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. The 1933 classic starring Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, and Fay Wray was intriguing, but it was Chief Technician Willis O’Brien’s stop motion animated gorilla that rocked Harryhausen’s world. From there it was a hop, skip, and a jump to settling on a career in film.

[“If I had first seen the 1975 SIC version of King Kong, I would have become a plumber.” - Ray Harryhausen]

In 1927, one of the earliest vampire movies, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, was released. Director F.W. Murnau and cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner shot the film based on Henrik Galeen’s script in Germany, Slovakia, and the Carpathian Mountains over several weeks film. By the time he set out to shoot Nosferatu, Murnau already had several movies under his belt. Having barely made it out of World War I alive, Murnau merged his love of the stage with his dark experiences and his newly kindled fascination with the occult and became a successful filmmaker. Most of his earliest films (his first, Emerald of Death, premiered in 1919) are now lost to the sands of time, and his twisted tale of a Transylvanian vampire almost suffered the same fate.

[“It will cost you sweat and tears, and perhaps...a little blood. ”]