Those and These

A few quick news bits for today, since it's Monday and I was half an hour late to work. But it wasn't my fault. Wait, actually it was. You see, I made the trip to the office this morning, prepped to be in right on time, when it struck me.

I had left pretty much everything I need for the day at home. On a table. In my bag.

So I turned around and, at first anyway, went all Speed Racer on the local streets, doing my best to avoid traffic and old ladies. Then, when I realized that, even if I had the Fantasticar, I'd still be late for work, I actually said, "meh" out loud.

And I hate the "word" meh.

Not the greatest way to start a new week, but it certainly could have been worse. Anywho, let's to the news, yes?

--First up, it looks like Marvel Studios has their Thunder God. Check out this article from Variety , which has Chris Hemsworth hand-picked by Marvel as who they want to play Thor.

There's an expected release date of May 20, 2011 for the Thor flick, and if Hemsworth does indeed sign on, he'll also play the God of Thunder in the planned 2012 Avengers movie.

Now, I don't really know who Chris Hemsworth is, but he was in Star Trek, I've learned, and he's in Joss Whedon's highly anticipated horror movie, The Cabin in the Woods, which opens in theaters next year.

And if he's good enough for Joss Whedon, then he's good enough for me.

--Next we have an update on the status of the "Let's Rebuild Len Wein's Comic Book Collection" Project, over on Mark Evanier's site. If you remember, we posted here a few weeks back that comic great Len Wein (creator of Wolverine and a host of others) lost his home--and much of his personal collection--in a horrible fire.

You can read that post right here, and you can read Mr. Evanier's latest update on the project right here.

Who says comics fans are stingy?

--And finally today we have a pretty cool story over at Entertainment Weekly for all you Kevin Smith fans out there. The writer/director will be taking a big part in some upcoming comics series, namely grabbing the reigns on writing duties for a newly-launched Green Hornet ongoing from Dynamite Entertainment and a stint on a new Batman mini-series for DC.

In the Batman series, entitled "The Widening Gyre," Smith will introduce a new hero to the DCU. The series will be 12 issues in two parts, each part spanning 6 issues with a six month break between parts. The artist will be Smith friend and penciller on the recently-wrapped Cacophony three-issue series, Walt Flanagan. After "Gyre" wraps, Smith will take helm of a new ongoing series featuring the new hero introduced in the mini.
As Smith fans know, the director was tapped to write and direct a Green Hornet film at one point, but dropped out. So Smith knows these characters well. I've never read any Green Hornet stuff previously, but Smith's a favorite of mine, and I'll be picking this up.

Oh, and one last note of Smith news--if you check out our Link of the Week to your right, you'll see that the venerable potty-mouth will be playing Carnegie Hall. Yep, that's right. And that's awesome.

Geek Chic, indeed.