That being said I’d like to quickly thank all past and current contributors (especially Devin T. Quin, Mat Kerwin, Matt Desiderio, and Mark Denardo), the various FP staffers who helped lay out issue after issue (esp. Lindsay Johnson and Alice Meichi Li) and all guest contributors (esp. Shannon Wheeler and Julia Wertz).

Though I was remiss in celebrating this anniversary upon issue #208’s publication I’ll be making amends in the coming weeks by posting some of the WP’s best articles and tidbits to Forbidden Planet NYC’s other blog (which, I encourage you to check out regardless).

Here’s to many more years of The Weekly Planet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Seeing this this morning on Blastr immediately provoked memories of Pavement:

Click here to view the embedded video.

On another note, I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve spent well over twenty years attempting to grow Trek sideburns to disastrous effect.  Which is okay, really, as some Starfleet Captains just plain forget to grow them.  Even when said Captain is not only the star of the show, they’re also the director:

I was driving with my daughter on the Sunday evening before our Monday morning shooting, and she looked over at me and asked, ‘Dad, where’re your Kirk sideburns?’ and immediately my gut turned over, as if I’d forgotten to do my homework. I clasped my hands to the sides of my head and I realized that in all the weeks that I’d been preparing to do this film, the script consulting, the wardrobe fittings, nobody had mentioned my sideburns. Everyone just assumed that I must know the routine by now, and that I would have the intelligence to grow them myself, which is overestimating any actor, I feel. It’s a lesson I want everybody to learn about actors. Never trust us, not for a minute.

-William Shatner on Star Trek V, from Star Trek: Movie Memories

• Actor Peter Jurasik, who played a compound interest program named Crom in the original film, showed up in an article in the Star News (North Carolina) over the weekend chatting about his experience while shooting the original classic film.

“Steve Lisberger who created it, first of all, he hired all of us for almost the entire run of the thing. So people became almost like a little family,” Jurasik said. “He put all those TRON video games right on the set, they served us breakfast, lunch and dinner right on the set. … I remember Jeff Bridges bringing his guitar and plugging in. It was a really nice set to be on because we were like … science fiction outlaws.”

Jurasik is a veteran bit player and SF television icon who co-starred with Tron himself,  Bruce Boxleitner, in the superlative Babylon 5.

• A new Hungarian poster reveals Jem, a character played by Beau Garrett (below).

• Similarly, there’s also a new poster depicting Jeff Bridges as Flynn, though I’m not so keen on this one for some reason.  Maybe I’m just waiting for a de-aged Bridges as CLU in some badass pose or something.  This one strikes me as something out of The Big Tronbowski, and I keep mentally replacing the Identity Disc with a bowling ball… comma dude.

END OF LINE.

…for some reason, when we find ourselves cracking one open in a public setting, we invariably anticipate the sideways glances and snickers of curious on-lookers wondering what a grownup is doing reading a funny book.It’s time to smash that stigma, friends.

In other words, as a great man once put it, “it’s clobberin’ time.”

This August 28th, The Daily Cross Hatch invites you to celebrate the first annual International Read Comics in Public Day. Let’s take to the libraries, the parks, the trains, and the buses, comic books in hand. Let’s show the world that we’re proud supporters of the vibrant art form that is comics—the greatest medium on earth.

We’re asking you, dear readers, to take an hour out of your Saturday to show the world what you think of sequential art.  You can find more information about the event (included a full-sized, printable version of the above poster, designed by Eschew artist, Robert Sergel) over at the official Read Comics in Public site. And while you’re at it, send a photo of you reading comics that day to readcomicsinpublic@gmail.com.

Thanks, and we’ll see you on the 28th!

To help auspiciously commemorate the occasion there will be a series of participant meetups in cities around the world.  Locations as of this post include Omaha, Stockholm, Portland (Maine), and wouldn’tcha know it, our own little sleepy berg New York City in Union Square, one block north of Forbidden Planet NYC.  The meetup will start at 1pm at the foot of the George Washington statue, and FP will be on hand giving out free bags of comics to as many people as we can.  Also, we’re offering a discount (20% OFF all comics and graphic  novels) from 10am-2pm that day to those who mention a secret code at point of sale.  To obtain the code just send an email to readcomicsinpublic@gmail.com.

Hope to see ya there, and enjoy the day no matter where you may be reading your comics!

Thankfully this only documents the Next Gen that might have been.  I shudder to think of a world in which Reggie Jackson flew the Enterprise.

And it was, very much so, a good day.

‘Specially cuz I didn’t have to use my AK.

Cuz, like, I never do.

Ruben’s on the road this week and was unavailable to shoot, but Josh performed without his partner admirably, focusing on Darwing Duck #3, Dark Rain, and the new issue of one the FP staff’s favorite new series in years, Bulletproof Coffin.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Happy birthday, by the way, Josh.

Now it seems Batman had a case of the munchies while on patrol and didn’t feel like paying for his chalupas.  The burrito burglary begins about 40 seconds into the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Methinks this is just a clever ad for Hispanic Batman.

I just spent a day on the Jersey shore with some family, and my return trip to Astoria, Queens is a four hour saga that will live in infamy in my memory for a long time to come.  But I won’t use this space to describe the horrors of the New Jersey Transit combined with a Giants/Jets game letting out followed by a sweltering 34th Street station wait for an N train that never seemed to come, and the drunken teenage riot of karaoke that plagued the final leg of my journey.

I will, however, use this space to hip you onto an article I came across in The New York Times’ business section (of all places) discussing Archie Comics…

At 68 years old, Archie is suddenly looking awfully spry.

His new zest for life is the work of new management at Archie Comics. The team is aggressively trying to take the tried, true and previously lethargic Archie family of characters, including Betty and Veronica, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie and her bandmates, and transform them into global brands in comics, film, apparel and more.

“We’re at the beginning of the beginning,” says Jon Goldwater, co-chief executive of Archie Comic Publications. “We’re going to expand. Publishing will always be part of it, but we must morph into a multimedia company.”

With more than $40 million in print and digital sales last year, Archie Comics, based in Mamaroneck, N.Y., is a small player in a large but unforgiving market dominated by DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment. Archie’s titles capture less than 1 percent of sales at comic book specialty shops, and the competitive challenge is only growing: Comics in general are battling the popularity of other distractions like video games and YouTube. And traditional readers of comics are aging, with no steady stream of new ones to take their place.

But comics alone are not what generate the hundreds of millions of dollars that characters from DC and Marvel can rake in, which is what Mr. Goldwater wants to emulate.

The full article can be found here.

And to the comic fan who interrupted me while I tackled the crossword, here’s the full list of this week’s new comics to answer your question.