A Comicbook Orange is really hitting its stride now, so I’m embedding it again. I honestly don’t know what more comic book fans would need. Girl in Wonder Woman costume? Check. The same girl talking straight in the next segment about why a new comic sucks? Check check. Go, Casey! Everyone else, spread the word. If you’re trying to make your limited comic-buying funds stretch and only get the good stuff, if you want to find out why people like comics, or if you just want to be entertained for a few minutes — you should be watching this show.

(cross-posted from the NNN Blog)

A Comicbook Orange is a comic book review show on Pulp Secret by our friends Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan (Galacticast), which I blogged about the other day. Feedback on the first episode so far has been great, and Rudy and Casey have been really building some great word of mouth — you can join an official Facebook group, find A Comicbook Orange on MySpace, and they’ve even built a cool site for the show where people can submit their own reviews.

Check it out below, and if you’re looking for more good comics to read, let us know what you’d like to see more of on A Comicbook Orange.

On a side note, this is also the first time we’ve put out an episode in a widescreen ratio — if you try to view the show fullscreen on the site, or download the iTunes-compatible file, you’ll see what we mean. It’s the little things that sometimes get us pumped.

Smith Mag is currently putting out another online graphic novel (after last year’s astounding Shooting War) called A.D., dealing with the survivors of Katrina and its aftermath. It’s a must-read, and Ana from Pulp Secret went down to talk to everyone involved — here’s the video.

Fred Seibert, one of my partners at Next New, let a pretty amazing thing slip the other day — that over at his other company, Frederator Studios, he’s making the new Castlevania movie with none other than Warren Ellis and James Jean.

The funny part was how I found out: in one of our regular, free-wheeling meetings where we talk about creative, I was showing him the mini-social network recently set up on Ning for members of Ellis’ message board, The Engine, as an example of an easy way to create basic community features around a show (which, by the way, our friends at JETSET just did) and Fred did a bit of a double take, and said, “Warren Ellis? I’m making a movie with him!”

Apparently Fred had no idea I’m a fan of Ellis’ writing and part of the loose (and large) community of people whom he’s pulled together on places like The Engine and the Bad Signal mailing list. And it wasn’t until Fred blogged about it tonight that I checked out the Castlevania production blog Ellis is writing and saw that James freaking Jean is providing art direction. This is the sort of thing I could completely geek out over, despite the fact that I missed Castlevania as a game growing up — hopefully, by knowing Fred, I’ll get a peek at the process every once in a while.

A little while back, I wrote about Nathan Fox here, and was super-pleased to get a nice note from him about it. We had a nice back and forth over email which led to him getting interviewed on the Pulp Secret Report today, but even better for me, he sent me this super cool self-portrait via email. I hope he doesn’t mind me posting it (I think fatherhood suits him, personally). 3D glasses not included.

Be sure to check out Nathan’s work on DMZ#18, on newsstands now at your friendly neighborhood comics shop. And check out the interview on Pulp Secret, embedded below.

It’s hard to resist just turning this blog into a place where I embed all the Next New Networks show episodes (hmm, maybe we should do that somewhere on a separate blog and feed, for the people who would want it).

That said, it’s really hard not to do it on Fridays, as each Thread Heads and Pulp Secret Report gets better and better, and both deserve a much wider audience. I’m buckling to the impulse today, and embedding them both here.

In Friday’s Thread Heads, we visit Etsy Labs and Bre from Make Magazine.

In Friday’s Pulp Secret Report, we have the usual comics insanity.

Hope you like ‘em. Anything you’d like to see, please email the shows or leave a comment on the site. We’ll be happy to listen.

My colleagues over at PulpSecret just cut the footage of our Kevin Smith meeting at NY Comic Con into a slightly different version than the original Galacticast one I posted a couple weeks back. Embedded above, or here at this link for anyone who can’t see it.

What a treat this week to get the Sunday NY Times Magazine and see this great Speed Racer homage on the cover by Nathan Fox, whose work I’ve always noticed and liked, as part of a series of illustrations for this week’s story about Toyota.

Fox has a loose, brushy style and pop sense of color that often gets him compared to Tomer Hanuka or Paul Pope; I think that all three of them are diverging a lot lately, but that latter comparison would be more apt in this series, where Fox let a manga influence really take over, and composed the drawings in panels, which I haven’t seen too often in his commercial work. Wish there were larger and clearer images online; illustration really gets the short shrift sometimes in the digital version, and these were especially beautiful in print.