“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. ”]

We start with a flashback to the day Rick fell into a coma after getting gutshot with Lori having a chat fest with a probably long dead girlfriend. Ostensibly, this cold open is supposed to set up and parallel what has befallen Carl and Rick. Except I don’t see the point of it other than as a time killer. If that was the only time Rick’s coma was mentioned it would have been fine, but every five seconds the writers stood up on their soap boxes and shouted, “CARL GOT SHOT JUST LIKE RICK!!! I HAZ SUBTLETY!!!” Kinda dims the impact of the analogy, dudes.

Otis’s little accident introduces us to kindly Dr. Hershel Greene (that’s Dr. Veterinarian to you, bub) and his family. Because of the extent of Carl’s injuries, Shane and Otis must scrounge up medical supplies at a the local capital of cannibalistic corpses, their friendly neighborhood high school. As expected, the raid goes to pot because nothing these people do will ever go right until they pause to formulate a solid plan before blundering into potentially life-threatening situations. Of course, stopping to think would cut into their shouting and screaming time, and we can’t have that, now can we?

[“Completely in over your head, aren’t you?” “Ma’am, aren’t we all?”]

And we’re back with season 2 of AMC’s hit show The Walking Dead. During the downtime, Robert Kirkman kept himself extremely busy. Comic issues 79-90, the novel Rise of the Governor, and a 6-part webisode series have fleshed out (har har) his bleak world in all its gorey, gooey, gutsy glory.

[“Hey J. C., you takin’ requests?”]

Fall has arrived and, much like a teenage boy, it has left the world damp, subject to constantly and randomly shifting conditions, and is determined to make me as irritable as possible. It also signals the start of the new television season, an event filled with trepidation, redundancy, and general disappointment. Granted, the 2011-2012 season has so far been less dispiriting than last year, but only if you squint real hard and cock your head to the side. Over the summer, studio execs swept the land clean of most of the cheesiest, vilest, and outright offensive shows. But in their wake, the bloated corpses of reheated premises and ploddingly plotted premieres have bobbed to the surface.  

[“Stupid TV! Be more funny!”]

Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead franchise is a smash hit. The comics dropped in 2003 to great acclaim and still continue to rake in the dough. In 2010, it picked up an Eisner for Best Continuing Series, and 88 issues later it’s still one of the highest selling monthly comics. The TV series took off like gangbusters as well. With 5.3 million people tuning in for the premiere episode, and 6 million for the finale, it became the most watched basic cable series ever in the 18-49 demo, all but guaranteeing it a second season. They even plan on breaking into the video game market this winter.

Today, Kirkman upped the ante by teaming with horror writer Jay Bonansinga at St. Martin’s Press to release the novel The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor.

[“I can’t let go of her, Brian...I can’t...she’s all I got.”]

Trevor Shane’s debut novel, Children of Paranoia, revolves around Joseph, a soldier in a secret war who has spent all of his adult life assasinating The Enemy. He doesn’t care who The Enemy is or why, he simply does his job and moves on to the next target. There are three rules in this war: don’t kill civilians, don’t kill minors, and don’t have kids before you’re 18 lest they be hand-delivered to The Enemy. When Joseph meets plucky young Canuck Maria, those rules are broken with disastrous consequences. Our protagonists are, of course, star-cross’d lovers, and wind up on the lam when The Man comes to rip them asunder.

[“[The rules] are simple but they are inflexible and the penalties for breaking these rules are severe. So listen closely.”]

This past weekend was the 69th annual World Science Fiction Convention, though that name hardly does it justice. It’s far too small to represent the world and sci-fi only comprises a portion of the attendee interest. It also hosts the Hugo Awards for the best — or most popular, depending on who you talk to — science fiction and fantasy of the previous year. My convention experience has been limited to an X-Files convention I went to as a kid for my birthday, one Nova Albion, and two San Diego Comic-Cons, so I had absolutely no idea what I’d be walking into. Now that I’m home, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it, but I know I had fun and cannot wait for Chicon 7.

[“That sound you’re hearing is a mind shifting without a clutch.” - Gregory A. Wilson]

Last year I made the mistake of trying to see EVERYTHING, regardless of feasibility. I misjudged distances and crowds and got stuck at the end of lines quadrupling back on themselves. The end result was frustrating and exhausting and I missed more panels than I attended. This year I resolved to go with the flow, pick a room, and stay for the day. But such stringent time management proved  unnecessary.

[“I think he’s the Monkey King like the Monkey King, like Thor is Thor.”]

Wanna know what I did this week? I spent Friday watching Adult Swim shows with 1700 other hipster nerds and a covey of awesomely hilarious panelists, then I spent Saturday chilling with comic book artist gods and heroes. Yup, you can go ahead and be jealous now.

[“Look, you all know I want you to suffer.” - Joss Whedon]

Thursday was a good day. No, scratch that. Thursday was a very good day. Thursday was that rare kind of good that borders on nerd good that spills into an awesomely, wonderfully, fantastically, magically, John Barrowman-y good. It was a day that began with Seth Green and ended with Torchwood and I am so full of geek pleasure that I’m fit to burst. And if I weren’t so gorram exhausted I just might.

[“Aww...cookiepuss.”]

Alan Campbell, video game designer and fantasy novelist, continues creating intriguing worlds with the first in the Gravedigger Chronicles, Sea of Ghosts. This is a fun, dark, creepy, and heartbreaking book full of typical fantasy tropes twisted around in exciting ways. Campbell’s fashioned characters I’d love to have a cup of tea with, even if I spent the entire conversation terrified they were going to kill me. Everyone plays their hand close to their chest and keeps an ace up their sleeve. Each character is rife with secrets and are a little too eager to manipulate those around them for their own malevolent purposes.

[“No human is innocent.”]

Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors by Livia Llewellyn is a collection of ten short fantastical and erotic horror stories that seems inspired by a feverish nightmare where O, in a fit of hatred and rage at René and Sir Stephen, turns their BDSM tactics into torture. It is a fine book written with such personal and illustrative prose that you often feel as if you’re viewing the action through the harried eyes of the narrator. It is dark, engaging, and stirring in all the right ways.

[“We stared at each other, stripped to our true selves, as naked as we would ever be to anyone. I would have cried, if I hadn’t felt such triumph.”]