Epipheo spoke with Daniel H. Wilson — Robotics PhD and author of Robopocalypse — to find out how to survive the inevitable robopocalypse, and the result was a very funny animated short.

Relevant: Steven Spielberg will start shooting the film adaptation of Robopocalypse this summer in Montreal. The film is targeting a July 2013 release.

As I said in the Notes for today’s strip, I absolutely loved The Avengers. It exceeded my expectations by a wide, wide margin.

The plot was kind of unremarkable, sure — standard-issue, super-villain plot with some MacGuffin-chasing thrown in — but the character moments were beautifully handled (always Whedon’s strong suit); the action was amazingly good; and it was funny as all hell, without ever undermining the urgency of the story.

The alien villains were a little on the faceless side, but I think in this first movie that’s good, because it let us focus on the team much more than if we had a more front-and-center villain. If they follow through with the Thanos tease in a second Avengers flick, this shouldn’t be an issue again.

Some quibbles:

1) The score. Cool (if not spectacular) theme, but the score never really did much for me throughout the film. I barely noticed it, and as a huge fan of movie scores, I generally try to notice the music.

2) What’s up with the Hulk anger issues? This one is more of a question, really, because I loved how the Hulk was used in the film more than enough to overlook this, but in the first scene with him, he’s raging at everything and fighting everyone. In the finale, he’s in control enough to cooperate with the others. Why?

3) Getting knocked unconscious breaks the magical mind control? I guess so.

4) What, was Thor standing in that field waiting to pick up the hammer for like five hours while everybody else got their shit together?

5) When the mothership goes down, all the aliens just shut down, too? Really? Cheap.

6) More of a marketing complaint, but I wish — oh I wish — that Hulk catching Iron Man hadn’t been in the trailer. Such a great moment, and coming after the climax of the film, practically, it should have been kept as a surprise.

Minor quibbles, all, don’t get me wrong. If I were still reviewing movies, I’d still give the film a well-earned 5 star rating. (Remember: I don’t do halfsies, and that doesn’t mean I think it’s perfect — just that I loved it.) As soon as I can get my girlfriend caught up on the earlier Marvel flicks (she’s seen two of the five), I’ll be seeing it again.

Up until the apparently obligatory (these days) tag at the end, this is a pretty moody, ominous trailer. I feel like studios force trailer cutters to add those things at the end. For lighter action flicks, sometimes it can be a fun little “hey also” to put in at the end, but here, it’s just tacked on, and considering we’ve already seen the flying whatever-it-is (I guess they just call it “the Bat”) earlier in the trailer, it’s kind of pointless.

But whatever. The movie itself looks as promising as it always has — I’m guessing everybody reading this is already on-board or not, and nothing Warner Brothers can show to us now is really gonna sway that. The Dark Knight Rises hits theaters on July 20th, 2012.

It’s a crash course in what you need to know to use Illustrator to make comics — and not just vector comics, either. I’ll be covering:

• Intro to Illustrator: A very quick explanation of what vectors are for the complete novice.

• Vector drawing basics: How to construct complex shapes out of multiple simple shapes.

• Lettering in Illustrator: Tricks for how to use this basic knowledge to letter your comics.

DATE: Thursday, May 3, 2012
TIME: 6 – 6:30 pm (right before the Cartoonist Conspiracy Jam)
LOCATION: 1618 Central Ave NE, Ste. 216, Nordeast MPLS

Click through to Nordeast Comics Summit page for the full details!

Help fund the production, printing, and distribution of the second Multiplex print collection by donating to the Multiplex: There and Back Again Project at the Multiplex Store! Donated funds will be used in the same manner as the funds raised by the Book 2 Kickstarter Project which has now ended, only now PayPal users (and other people who can’t or don’t care to use Kickstarter or Amazon Payments) can get involved. These are characterized as donations, because PayPal has a policy that all purchases must be shipped within 30 days. Obviously, the book will not be ready then.

The “prices” (donation amounts) are slightly different from the Kickstarter rewards in that the Kickstarter rewards had some amount of shipping built into their required minimum pledge, and extra shipping was required for international backers. Here, the shipping will be based on an estimate (which is usually pretty accurate), so international backers will be paying an estimated shipping amount that may be higher (or lower) than Kickstarter backers were required to pay. US contributors will find them identical in “cost” to the Kickstarter rewards, once shipping is added on at checkout.

The estimated publication date for Multiplex: There and Back Again is currently February 2013. This is subject to change.

At this point, I’ve only made the most popular Kickstarter rewards available for purchase, and some of them are unnecessary by the fact that you can just order Multiplex: Enjoy Your Show or the Chapters 1–5 eBooks separately from your donation (and also have Book 1 shipped immediately, rather than wait for Book 2 to be published, as Kickstarter Backers do). If there were any other Kickstarter rewards you would have liked to see, simply leave a comment here or e-mail Gordon, and I’ll set it up for you.

Multiplex: There and Back Again Lightning Round has met (and surpassed) its secondary funding goal of $17,500! Thank you to everybody who has pledged so far and made the Book 2 Kickstarter even more successful — both in terms of number of backers and money raised — than the Book 1 Kickstarter! Many readers (and a few reviews) commented on the production quality and design of Multiplex: Enjoy Your Show, and the extra time and money I can spend on Book 2 will help me ensure that this one turns out even better.

The next (tertiary?) funding goal is the following — with about 12 hours left in the funding period, it’s a bit of a long shot at this point, but I thought I’d dangle that carrot here anyway…

$20,000 — eBooks will be produced in both PDF and ePub format. All backers [with eBooks included in their reward packs] will be get both formats (or just one, if you want). Also, backers at the $100 Reward Level and up will get their Chapter 1–10 eBooks delivered on a USB key along with their other pledge rewards.

While I will be opening up for PayPal donations soon, the USB key is only for Kickstarter backers, since I’ll need to start costing the custom production ASAP (the keys will have the Multiplex logo printed on them). It is off the table after the Kickstarter funding period ends tonight at midnight.

Pencils for Multiplex #647 

There 48 hours to go in the Multiplex: There and Back Again Lightning Round Kickstarter drive.

In celebration of this, and to promote one final push upwards, I will be giving TWO page of original sheets* of pencils or inks (signed by me) from the current zombie storyline away to a random Kickstarter backers. If you’ve already pledged, you are already entered! You can pledge $1 (although I’ll only get like 65¢ from that, you know that right?), or you can pledge $3,333. You have the same chance of winning. Only Kickstarter backers — of any amount — are eligible. Sorry, people waiting for the PayPal option to open up.

But wait! There’s more! If we get to the secondary funding goal of $17,500 — less than $700 away — by the end of the Kickstarter project at MIDNIGHT, Thursday, April 12th, I will increase that to FOUR sheets.

This is in addition to the super awesome bookmark that will be added to the Basic Sponsor Pack (and Super Sponsor Pack) rewards.

AND THAT’S NOT ALL. If we get to the next funding goal of $20,000 by the end of the Kickstarter project, I will increase that to SIX sheets.

* I say “sheets” because I draw them on 11×14 sheets of Bristol paper. Some strips/pages of the finished comic are broken up across two sheets. And some sheets only have one panel on them. Which page you get is random. But they’re all awesome, man. All of them.

Multiplex: There and Back Again Lightning Round has met (and surpassed) its funding goal! Thank you to everybody who has pledged so far! Every one of your pledges has been vital to the project’s success, and I am incredibly grateful for your support. Multiplex has never been a runaway success in terms of readership, so your enthusiasm of my little cult comic is tremendously humbling.

The fact that we’ve passed the funding goal means, of course, what next?

I’ve said before anything over $15,000 will go toward paying off my lingering debts from Book 1, the promotion of Book 2, and, of course, supporting the continued production of the regular comic strip. As with the Book 1 Kickstarter project, I will share how I spend the funds with you in backer-only updates.

But allow me to sweeten the deal slightly with new Funding Goals:

$17,500 — Bookmarks will be added to the Basic Sponsor Pack (a.k.a. the $40 Reward Level, the $75 Reward Level, and up — but not the $50 “Just the Book” Reward Level, because it’s just the books).

$20,000 — eBooks will be produced in both PDF and ePub format. All backers [with eBooks included in their reward packs] will be get both formats (or just one, if you want). Also, backers at the $100 Reward Level and up will get their Chapter 1–10 eBooks delivered on a USB key along with their other pledge rewards.

$22,500 — ALL backers at the $8 level and up will get the Chapter 11 eBook free when it is completed.

$25,000 — ALL backers at the $8 level and up will get the Chapter 12 eBook free when it is completed.

$27,500 — ALL backers at the $8 level and up will get the Chapter 13 eBook free when it is completed.

$30,000 — ALL backers at the $8 level and up will get the Chapter 14 eBook free when it is completed.

$32,500 — ALL backers at the $8 level and up will get the Chapter 15 eBook free when it is completed.

Beyond that? Let’s worry about that later. :)

Okay, so I made my “reasonable guesses” as to how Emerald City Comicon went in the Notes from the Manager for today’s strip, and surprisingly enough I wasn’t all that far off. No Summer Glau or George Takei. Spike didn’t attend, so I didn’t get to see her, and I missed out on any Joel Watson karaoke, if there was any. I had awakened on Thursday with a sore throat, though, which had progressed to a full-blown cold by Friday morning. Sadly, I can’t even blame it on airports or the usual confluenza, since I had it before I even left for the airport.

I got into Seattle on Thursday and was quickly whisked off to a gala affair at Phil Foglio’s house with David Willis, which involved a handful of webcomickers sitting and standing around talking shop (as these things do) and some friends of Phil’s and Bill Barnes’s.

Alas, because of my progressively worse cold, I didn’t get to play that much with my fellow webcomickers, but on Saturday night, I did get to have a deliciously hilarious (and inevitably foul) dinner with Tom Brazelton, Danielle Corsetto, Randy Milholland, Lar De Souza and Ryan Sohmer, Joel Watson, and David again before I crapped out. (I shared a hotel room with Dave and Joel, too — after I split Sunday night, this situation ended exactly as you would expect it would.)

Illness notwithstanding, it was great meeting a lot of familiar faces from last year’s ECCC as well as From The Internet, including several backers from the Book 1 Kickstarter project and a few from the new one for Book 2, which even ended up passing $10,000 on Sunday afternoon, before my prediction posted with Monday’s.

Sorry if I got any of you sick by shaking your hand. (As if you’d know it was me specifically.) For what it’s worth, I was Purelling the shit out of my hands every day. Usually I do it to keep from getting sick, but this time, it was to keep anyone else from getting sick.

I had a great time doing a ton of sketches at the show. The Mega Man vs. Cthulhu one above was one of my favorites. If anybody else wants to share sketches I did for them, either in books or on a sheet of Bristol, tweet a photo of it at me! I forgot to take photos of some really fun ones, unfortunately.

Still ad-free (and 99¢ because of it), version 1.2 sports a new icon and some higher res UI images. Sorry, the strip images are still the same size… for now. Remember, this is decidedly an iPhone/iPod Touch app, not really an iPad app (although it will run on one)!

The big new feature, though, is the most requested one since the app launched — BOOKMARKS. You can now bookmark a strip and easily jump back to where you left off the next time you open the app. And you can now tweet or e-mail your favorite strips straight from the app, as well.

As always, if you like the app, please leave a review at the iOS App Store! The better the app sells, the more incentive my brother has to continue developing it and other stuff for me. :)

And so… Multiplex: There and Back Again Lightning Round, the Kickstarter Project for Book 2. And, if we make more than the goal, maybe even Book 3 as well.

I don’t want to rehash everything I say on the Kickstarter Project page, so please just go there and read it.

Finished, already?

Alright.

As I said there, the fundraising period for Book 1 was way too long. This time, I’m doing three weeks and out. (Well, 23 days, so it ends at midnight on April 12th.) This way, I won’t get sick of it, and hopefully you won’t get sick of me, either. If we don’t make our goal in that time, so be it. No Book 2 for… who knows how long? But I’d like to do it sooner rather than later, and I hope that enough of you do, too.

You already know that I will live up to my end of the project — I did with Book 1, didn’t I? You already know what the book will look like — it’ll look like Book 1, or maybe a little better. You already know what Kickstarter is, because it’s like this huge freaking THING now, whereas when I did Book 1, I was the first webcartoonist to use it, ever. So all the biggest question marks with the first project don’t apply anymore.

The last remaining question is: Do you want Book 2?

It has been updated to version 1.1, for iOS 5.1 compatibility (the 5.1 update caused the app to crash on launch) and, as a bonus, it is now ad-free. It’s a free update for existing users, of course, but because of the whole no-ads thing 99¢ to newbs. Truth be told, my brother (the programmer) and I have been taking a bath on the “free” app because of the annual dev program fee and the cost of keeping his coding software up to date. The 99¢ cost will hopefully balance that out more than the miniscule $40 per year we earned from iAds revenue.

And don’t forget! There’s a sale on original sketches and vector portraits in the Multiplex Store through next Friday! All proceeds go to my accountant and the IRS!

I remember experimenting with pupils in the characters’ eyes when I first designed them (seven years ago, for the oldest cast members) but at that point, the strip was so undetailed that it looks bizarre to have this small area of heightened detail. Now, I pack a bit more into each panel, so it doesn’t seem so out of place. Or maybe I just changed my mind. I dunno.

(This will, of course, also be the second chapter in Multiplex Book 2, currently/tentatively titled Multiplex: There and Back Again.)

Chapter 7 has two more strips left before I can publish it, but I probably won’t have time to get to those until after I’m back from Emerald City Comic Con, unfortunately!

I am working on a very cool freelance project right now, but I won’t be seeing any money from that for at least a month. (Ah, the life of a freelancer.) And there is a chance I will be doing a Kickstarter project for Book 2 soon, but that money would be entirely for the book (and also well over a month away).

So! In order to hopefully raise some of the several hundred dollars I need ASAP, I’ve dropped the price of hand-drawn sketches in the Multiplex Store to $20 (plus shipping) and vector portraits to $60 for the next two weeks to help raise a little cash.

You can also get pages of original art from the zombie story arc (feel free to inquire about any other pages not listed in the store) or be a Multiplex: The Movie Sponsor and appear as a zombie in the strip when filming gets started back up again.

I am also available for any freelance illustration or print design & production needs you might have — for your blog, website, magazine, book, whatever! You can see my portfolio over at www.gordonmcalpin.com and shoot me an e-mail with details!

And, of course, if you don’t want to clutter your house up, you can just donate to Multiplex via PayPal:

Anyway. If you’d like something to tide you over ’til then, please check out this a recent hand-drawn illustration I did for ReviverSoft that I thought turned out rather well. I did the portrait of guest blogger Rantz Hoseley also, but I mean the one farther down the page.

(If you didn’t know, I do illustrations for ReviverSoft’s computer tips blog now and then to help pay mah billz. If you’re of the Windows persuasion or you’d just like to occasionally see drawings by me that pertain to computers, subscribe to their RSS feed! And if you have a blog or podcast or website of your own that you’d like to fancy up by commissioning graphics or illustrations for it by me, feel free to shoot me an e-mail — especially if your site has anything to do with comics or movies! Because they’re awesome.)

The full trailer for The Hunger Games premiered on Good Morning America today, with much more about the plot than the teaser trailer (which is little more than a retread of The Running Man or Battle Royale). Jennifer Lawrence continues to look promising as Katniss, but the supporting cast continues to make my face wrinkle with its almost random assortment of talent, including Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland, Wes Bentley, Toby Jones, and Lenny Kravitz. Many (Harrelson, especially) seem mismatched to the tone the trailer is displaying here… but I guess we’ll see if it all comes together on March 23, 2012.

You can check it out in higher definition over at Apple.

The full synopsis is after the cut:

Every year in the ruins of what was once North America, the evil Capitol of the nation of Panem forces each of its twelve districts to send a teenage boy and girl to compete in the Hunger Games. A twisted punishment for a past uprising and an ongoing government intimidation tactic, The Hunger Games are a nationally televised event in which “Tributes” must fight with one another until one survivor remains. Pitted against highly-trained Tributes who have prepared for these Games their entire lives, Katniss is forced to rely upon her sharp instincts as well as the mentorship of drunken former victor Haymitch Abernathy. If she’s ever to return home to District 12, Katniss must make impossible choices in the arena that weigh survival against humanity and life against love. THE HUNGER GAMES is directed by Gary Ross, and produced by Nina Jacobson’s Color Force in tandem with producer Jon Kilik. Suzanne Collins’ best-selling novel, the first in a trilogy published by Scholastic that has over 16 million copies in print in the United States alone, has developed a massive global following.

Laika, the stop-motion animation studio that produced Coraline, is back next year with ParaNorman.

In the film, a boy who can speak to the dead must save his town from a zombie uprising.

ParaNorman is aiming for a August 17, 2012, release. The voice cast features Kodi Smit-McPhee, Casey Affleck, Tempestt Bledsoe, Jeff Garlin, John Goodman, Bernard Hill, Anna Kendrick, Leslie Mann, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse.

This new trailer gives you a little more about the story than the teaser trailer, but lacks the teaser’s punch, I think. Still, I trust Brad Bird not to make a bad movie, and there are enough glimpses of awesome between the two trailers that I’m still very much on board.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol hits theaters on December 16th.

Written and directed by Angelina Jolie, In the Land of Blood and Honey centers around “a love affair [that] blooms between a Bosnian woman and a Serbian man during war in the 1990s.” It stars Goran Kostić, Zana Marjanović, and Rade Å erbedžija — the film’s cast is entirely local actors (if you can call the six countries former comprising Yugoslavia “local”).

The film hits screens on December 23, 2011 — which is basically shorthand for, “We think this is an Oscar contender.” There are two versions of the film, which were filmed simultaneously: one in English, and another in the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language (or BHS). Undoubtedly, we’ll get the English one here.

As a longtime fan of Zhang’s films (particularly Hero and his earlier, quieter dramas like Happy Times, Not One Less and Raise the Red Lantern), I’m definitely interested in this, although perhaps because I don’t knowing much about the historical events in question, I couldn’t make a ton of sense out of this trailer.

The film also stars Shigeo Kobayashi, presumably as a Japanese soldier, and I noticed Paul Schneider (All the Real Girls, Parks & Recreation) in the trailer, as well.

The Flowers of War will be the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film in the next Academy Awards (according to an old /Film article on the film, the film is about 60% Mandarin and 40% English), and so it will get a release before the end of the year somewhere, but possibly not a very big one.

Written by John and Max Landis (yes, that John Landis) and directed by Josh Trank, Chronicle stars Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, Alex Russell and Michael Kelly, and it hits theaters on February 3, 2012.

(Sorry to everybody outside of the US, because MTV Movies got the exclusive on this one.)

Directed by Anthony Hemingway from a screenplay by John Ridley (based on a story by executive producer George Lucas) and starring Bryan Cranston, Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Daniela Rush, and Michael B. Jordan, Red Tails soars into theaters on January 20, 2012.

The story could go either way: as a fictionalized “based on true missions” tale, the fictionalization will either make or break it. It could fall prey to jingoistic urges, or it might let just enough gray slip into the frame to ring true. The fact that the Navy reserved the right to approve footage for security reasons and apparently gave the filmmakers its approval will probably lean many peoples’ guesses one way or another, depending on their own political leanings.

The stateside dramatics might fall into too-familiar territory, or they could add a little extra dimension. The fact that the films stars non-actors is both interesting and worrisome.

So in light all these wild cards and nothing else really solid to go on, let’s just look at this purely as an action movie for a second and take note that the footage looks really freakin’ cool:

Act of Valor stars Alex Veadov, Roselyn Sanchez and Nestor Serrano. The film was directed by Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh and hits theaters on February 17, 2012.

For a little more background about the film, this Wall Street Journal article goes into a fair amount of detail.