Agent Palmer

With the news of researchers at the University of Rochester developing a “three-dimensional, transmitting, continuously multidirectional cloaking” device, it’s time to dream big.

This cloaking device is being related to Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak but, in truth, cloaking or invisibility has been a part of Dungeons & Dragons, science fiction, comics, gaming, and literature well before J.K. Rowling put pen to paper.

This past weekend, I had the privilege of attending The Great Allentown Comic Con Summer Show at Merchants Square Mall. As usual, it was filled with vendors of comic books and other pop culture paraphernalia, artists and other vendors, as well as, my fellow attendees, those in cosplay and those who just showed up with their geek on their sleeve.

I have said before and I’ll say it again, The Great Allentown Comic Con is getting too big for itself. This is not a complaint, more of an observation, and a good problem for the organizers to have at that.

Heavy Metal was released on Aug. 7, 1981. It was produced on a meager $9.3 million budget, but grossed nearly $20 million dollars during it’s initial theatrical release. Twenty-five years later, after some music industry scuffles about song rights, the film was re-released, as “Louder and Nastier than Ever,” in theaters on March 8, 1996 and later that year was released on VHS and Laserdisc, which sold over a million units. Five years after that in 2011, it was released on Blu-ray.

The film follows closely to the magazine it shares its title with, in that it was a film made up of 10 stories, although only nine were released. The only differentiating factor between the movie and the magazine, is that the movie is tied together with the Loc-Nar, while the magazine stories are not tied together at all in any given issue.