Today we have to start with the new movie by Peter Jackson called D-9. There’s been a lot done with sci-fi alien flicks, but this looks like something new and very cool. What if aliens were on our planet, but we didn’t want them here? Not because they were attacking, as you might expect, but because maybe they were using up resources that we needed ourselves? What if there were bad feelings toward them?

These are some of the issues explored in this new movie. Watch the trailer to get a better sense, and then definitely check out the immersive website which is quite well done. I love when a movie can build a “world experience” around their subject, and this is what they have done. Not only the main site, but side sites exist (like one for the MNU) which further cement the idea that this is a “real” situation. This is something I wanted to do with the NFF site for Marooned, but I simply don’t have enough time. Anyway, check it out, it looks great.

I’ve mentioned Jump Leads before, the British Sci-fi comedy webcomic about the Lead Service by Ben Paddon. Ben has released his first book, Tales from the Flurry which contains the first two stories from the comic plus 20 pages of new material. Check it out.

Speaking of books, I’ve been slowly trying to prepare files for the second Marooned comic book. I’ve got ten pages done so far. It’s a little slower this time, because it’s color and I’m going back and tweaking these strips a bit to make them a little nicer, a little more consistent with what I do now. Believe me it’s nothing major, in some cases the difference will be minor. In some cases certain strips had to be modified to fit on a page.

So the end product should be pretty nice. As I said before, this book will be bigger, I hope close to twice the amount of comics, plus more bonus material. I’ll probably do another book-only strip and include a bit more development material in the Marooned Vault.

The commentary will probably be in it’s own section in the back this time. While some people dug it on each page, enough people didn’t seem to mind if it was in back. I really don’t want the commentary to distract from reading the story, especially as the strip starts to get into story mode with the second book.

Not sure when this will be released, the lead time to print the book at Ka-Blam is about a month. So it will be a month from when I finish it, which is going to be a while yet. I’ll keep you posted.