You can’t stop the Defenestration train once it starts moving. You need to either jump on board or get the hell out of the way. The January 2008 issue is here, and it’s already taken out fifteen cows!
January is that time of the year where we get to hear about all the movies that will come out in the next eleven months, which I will a.) go watch and b.) probably hate. For example, Prince Caspian, the next installment of C.S. Lewis’ Jesus-is-a-lion fantasy series comes out this year. It’s the only story aside from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that didn’t outright suck, but that’s not saying much. I expect lots of fighting scenes that I will enjoy, a lot of stupid dialogue spoken by a bunch of British kids I don’t really care about, and the ever-present thought that everything looks suspiciously lifted from Lord of the Rings.
Then there’s In the Name of the King, which has a nice title but looks like every other fantasy story ever told, complete with monsters that look an awful lot like orcs and uninspired “heroic” banter. It even has John Rhys-Davies in it. But look, there’s an entire army of female warriors, so OOOOOH I’ve got to see it because the writers are clearly SUCH modern thinkers!
We’ll also get to see a bunch of computer-generated cartoons, because Hollywood is convinced 2-D animation is dead. This leaves us with things like last year’s Ten Commandments, which was so poorly animated God himself struck down everyone involved with the movie with bolts of lightning (sparing only Alfred Molina, who I can only assume was forced to do the movie at gunpoint).
I’m only  really looking forward to two things: the next Hellboy movie, which, even though all the faerie folk look like all the things Guillermo del Toro couldn’t fit into Pan’s Labyrinth, will be awesome because Ron Perlman looks great in red. And the next Batman movie, because it’s got the Joker in it. Best. Comic. Villain. EVER.
End rant.
Just a heads up: we’ve altered our mail system to strictly segregate submissions from utter crap. Make sure the subject line of anything you send to us has the appropriate label, as requested on our submissions page. Anything that doesn’t contain the proper words in the subject line get dumped in a folder that is never read and instantly emptied every day.
Now, go enjoy the magazine. Five writers, two poets, a new Defenestrati strip, new columns, and some random piece of amusing crap we found in the office await your eyes.
—Andrew Kaye, editor-in-chief