Well, it’s been quite a while in production but it looks as though we can finally see the new serial adventures of The Mercury Men at syfy.com, starting on July 25th.

I wrote about the previews for this production back in August of 2009. There have been some bits and bobs of news since then, but this is certainly the biggest and best news of all.

It’s great to know that they’ve found a home for it, hopefully (but not likely) bringing in great big bags of money and popcorn. My guess is, the popcorn’s a lock.

And until the 25th of July you can amuse yourself by browsing the project’s digital props like, for example, the entirely imaginary action figures, the entirely printable papercraft characters, and the entirely unnecessary vintage newspaper ads. What? Did I say unnecessary was bad? Some of my best friends are unnecessary.

Anyhow the syfy link above goes to their home for the episodes; but the production itself has its own site, here.

Here’s somebody else’s robot, called Rosie; she’s one of a cast of characters for Thomas E. Kyzivat’s project, Americana, whose eponymous heroine we see on the right. He describes the story:

… it’ll follow Americana as she travels across a retro-future America to find her destiny at The City of Tomorrow! Sort of like the Wizard of Oz crossed with Huck Finn, but on Route 66. And with more robots.

Which, you know. sounds pretty swell to me.

Apart from these character sketches Kyzivat doesn’t seem to have made available much information about Americana, either at his DeviantArt account or on his nifty, streamline moderne web site, Murderous Automation. So I guess we’ll just have to wait!

Over at CoolandCollected.com there’s an article that links to several bits of vintage Buck Rogers mayhem on auction at Hake’s – like the Cocomalt premium Buck Rogers Cut-Out Adventure Book, probably my favorite. That’s where this incredibly buildable rocket ship design drawing comes from, along with a bunch of cut-out characters and scenes. Oh, to be a kid again, twenty years before I was born!

Also not to be missed: the 1934 wind-up rocket ship, with loads of neat box art. To see the whole article, just go here.

Over at Pappy’s Golden Age Comics you can see two different Gray Morrow comics from 1965’s Creepy #3. As Pappy rightly observes they’re interesting partly because they’re so different, although drawn at about the same time.

Morrow was all over these old Warren magazines – and of all the things I wish I still had, well, those are high up on the list – and his was a familiar hand on paperback books and their frontispieces back in the day. Very nice stuff.

Not new, but new to me, this is Greg Nicotero’s short newsreel style film about the shocking truth behind the monster movies of decades past, in which the monsters were working for scale. In scale. in a full-scale Hollywood talent agency that barely trained them, shot them full of tranquilizers at the end of each scene, and usually managed to feed them without losing an arm and a leg.

Nicotero’s the special effects makeup designer behind AMC’s The Walking Dead, and he’s one of the criminal masterminds behind KNB EFX Group (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Syfy Dune, and so on).

Honestly, this is pretty much what I figure was really going on. It must have been pretty difficult. You only get one take for the Wolfman scene!

via Warren Ellis, via a cast of thousands.

One of several by Andrew Lipson and Daniel Shiu.
… via How to Be a Retronaut.

Tentacular, Tentacular is a multiple-choice interactive story from Ars Technica in which you (yes, you!) can play the part of a private investigator who is (or will be) hard boiled, hard bitten, hard fried, hard nosed, or hardly married to a booth babe, all depending on what you (yes, you!) choose to do when confronted by a plot of creeping madness in a Las Vegas trade show. With an extra side of Elder Gods and bacon!

Along the way, you (yes, you!) may encounter eldritch beings like, well, Steve Ballmer, Sergey Brin, Alec Baldwin, and more, as you try to solve the mystery of why thousands of geeky conventioneers, all smelling faintly of bacon, are being driven totally insane by their unscheduled encounter with Cthulhu himself. Itself. Thing. Self. Thingself. Whatever.

And you may learn a new use for coaxial cables, too.

The Uira Engine – that astonishing bit of retro futuristic flimflammery that powers the Raygun Gothic Rocketship – will be one of the objects shown by Alan Rorie and his co-conspirators at this year’s Maker Faire. Rorie’s shown here discussing the Engine at San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

The Engine won’t be alone, but all we know so far is that there will be "some new work that I’ve not even posted about".