Having been through this type of thing before, I’m reminded once again how lucky I am to have a such great social and professional circles, full of people who go out of their way to help out in whatever ways they can. I’m not wearing a hat at the moment, but if I was, I’d be tipping it to you, the awesome people.

As far as updates go, I’ve received a pretty amazing amount of freelance opportunities over the last few days, and I’ve already accepted a few assignments both inside the comic book movie world and well outside it — which is nice. If there’s one positive I’m going to take out of all this, it’s the opportunity to flex muscles I haven’t used in a long time, and write about things that have nothing to do with comics, movies, or television.

I’ve been inundated with questions from friends and professional contacts lately, so it’s probably worth answering a few of the most frequent ones here. To that end, here’s a quick run-through of the most common questions I’m getting and the answers I’ve been giving:

Q: What happened with MTV?

A: All I was told was that they’re “restructuring” MTV News and I was no longer needed as the editor of Splash Page.

Q: What’s happening with Splash Page?

A: I honestly have no idea. I wasn’t given any indication of their future plans for the site.

Q: If you were unexpectedly cut loose by MTV, why was your announcement so upbeat?

A: In the three years I was with MTV, I saw a lot of people come and go, and to be honest, it felt like it was my time to leave. Splash Page always felt like an experiment in covering a niche that MTV had never really explored, and I feel pretty good about what we accomplished with it. It was always an uphill battle with the site, so it’s nice to leave while it’s at a high point.

Oh, and like I mentioned earlier, I’m looking forward to doing many of the things I simply couldn’t do when I was under the MTV banner. Book and movie reviews, writing about comics and related geekery, and so many other subjects outside the comic book and movie worlds were off-limits during my time with Splash Page. Now they’re all fair game.

Q: What’s next?

A: At the moment, I’m taking freelance writing and editing assignments, but I’m keeping an eye out for anything that would seem like a good fit. (If you see anything, feel free to pass it along.) One thing’s for sure, though: I’ll keep everyone posted about recent work here on MindPollution.org. So keep an eye on it.

Once again, thank you to everyone who’s offered kind words, support, and leads over the last week. Go ahead and give yourself a +10 to Karma, okay? You deserve it.

Just in case you missed them, here are the previous features:

‘X-Men: First Class’ Easter Eggs: Five Things To Look For This Weekend!

‘Thor’ Easter Eggs: Five Things To Look For In Marvel’s New Movie!

Enjoy the movie(s)!

Who Is Andrew Garfield? Get To Know The Next Spider-Man! – Like many people, I had no idea what to think about the actor named as the new Spider-Man — mainly because I’d never heard of him. Turns out, he’s got a pretty decent reason for being the guy to bring Peter Parker back to the big screen. (Oh, and he was in “Doctor Who,” so that helps.)

Spider-Man Writers And Artists Give MTV Their Thoughts On Andrew Garfield – With all the excitement over the new “Spider-Man” actor, I reached out to some of the comic creators I’m friendly with who have written or illustrated Spidey stories in the past. They had lots to say about Andrew Garfield getting the role.

DC Comics Execs Explain Digital Distribution Plan, Answer Fans’ Burning Questions – After DC Comics launched a new set of apps for the iPad, iPhone and Playstation Network, I talked to Co-Publisher Jim Lee and Executive Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Business Development John Rood about the company’s digital distribution plan. Along with questions culled from message boards and commentary around the online world, I asked them where the Droid fits in the digital future of DC Comics.

Jeph Loeb Talks Marvel Television, Live-Action Heroes, And The Disney Factor – Marvel created a new television division, so I got new Executive Vice President Jeph Loeb on the phone to offer up some details about Marvel’s plans for the TV world.

Basically, my macbook’s hard drive decided a few weeks ago that getting out of bed was highly overrated and that staying in sleep mode was its preferred state — a decision that, when it comes down to it, is hard for me find a good argument against. I spent a few weeks trying to fix the problem myself, restoring old backup points via Time Machine and deleting anything that smelled of potential errors, to no avail. I ended up having to replace the laptop’s hard drive, which was luckily still under warranty, but discovered to my great frustration that I had deleted most of my useful backups during my “I can fix it, I don’t need to bring it to the mac store” fervor. So, it’s back to square one with everything I had installed on the laptop over time, and that’s had no small part in delaying my return to regular posting.

What’s been going on in the meantime? Well, I interviewed writer/actor/”just this guy” Wil Wheaton about “Watchmen” — which was pretty neat. Wil’s a genuinely decent guy who has a real appreciation for the film and, more importantly, its source material. He doesn’t seem to hold it up as the holy grail of comics like some folks do, but he has an understandable reverence for it — which is more in line with my own thoughts on this “groundbreaking graphic novel” (as the marketing and media — myself included — keep referring to it).

Here’s an excerpt from my interview with Wil, which you can read in full on Splash Page:

MTV: Wil, now that you’ve seen “Watchmen,” what was the scene you most looked forward to seeing? Did it hold up?

WW: This is super spoilery for people who haven’t read the book, so avert your eyes if necessary: When I first read the book, I was about 15 or something, and I didn’t really pay attention to the backgrounds, so it wasn’t until the second time around that I realized, “Holy s–t, that’s Rorschach with the sign in all those panels!”

Me? I saw “Watchmen” a few days before the wide release. I prefer to wait on reviewing something like this until after its been out a day or two, though, so the people most sensitive to “spoilers” have had their chance to check it out. To that end, I’ll have some thoughts on the film posted here in the next day or two.

On a side note (and in response to all of the people who contacted me when they found out about my early screening of the film), the early screenings aren’t simply a “perk” of the gig. More often than not, unless I’m invited to a press screening like this, I won’t have a chance to see the film until it nears the end of its theatrical run or, in the case of films like “The Spirit” and “Incredible Hulk,” until it gets released on DVD. People tend to be shocked whenever I tell them I haven’t seen the latest blockbuster (especially the comics-influenced films), but after absorbing so many of the important plot points and story elements prior to release, and repeatedly going over the film with a fine-toothed comb to find every possible coverage angle, I rarely have enough remaining excitement about a film to brave the opening weekend crowds on my own dime. That, combined with the fact that readers’ interest in most films tends to take a sharp decline once the project is released, tends to make my brain move on to the next yet-to-be-released film as soon as the last one hits theaters. “Watchmen” would have likely been the exception to both of these issues (I would’ve made a point to see it, and probably would’ve had a difficult time forgetting about it and moving on), but still, it’s one of those sad aspects of the gig that removes a little of the shine.

The Oscars also went down during my off-the-grid period, and I spent most of that weekend sick and fluctuating between pouring sweat and violently shivering. I did manage to catch Hugh Jackman’s comics-friendly musical intro, though. Between that and the massive number of people I know chatting about “Watchmen” these days, I can’t say enough about how great it is to be involved with covering any aspect of the comics world. As I mentioned on Twitter Thursday night, I couldn’t be more happy about having so many new people to talk about comics with.

The day after the Oscars, I reached out to a wide-ranging list of comic book creators to get their thoughts on the presence of comic book movies at this year’s Academy Awards, and some of the responses were quite thought-provoking. I collected them all in a post you can read over at Splash Page. Here’s an excerpt:

DARICK ROBERTSON: I’m enthusiastic that audiences and critics are finally getting in on the secret we comic nerds have known for years: That comics have great stories with great characters that will appeal to a wide audience, if presented faithfully in a serious manner, instead of being played for laughs or dumbed down as if only for kids to enjoy. It’s exciting to see good material and sincere performances be embraced by the public.

“Iron Man” and “Dark Knight” weren’t simply good comic book movies, they were just good movies with comic book characters in them. The award nominations and huge box office sales tells me that the hard road that the more challenging writers and artists have taken in comics to shake things up were the right roads. It would have been easy to keep pumping out formulaic pictures, but instead, fans of the genre have infiltrated Hollywood and let their inner geeks shine, and the results were Oscar-worthy movies. How encouraging and rewarding.

PETER DAVID: I think comic book films have joined the same ghettoizing that you typically see accorded comedies, thrillers, animation and with rare exception major tentpole films. Let’s face it, the two best films of last year were “Wall-E” and “The Dark Knight” with “Iron Man” right up there. We’ve already had more recognition for movies based on comics: Look at the attention paid to “History of Violence” or “Road to Perdition.” Unfortunately movies based on comic book action properties are persistently ignored because of the same biases that keep most such films out of the running for major recognition.

And that about brings us up to speed, really. I’ll have a more in-depth analysis of “Watchmen” up shortly, and now that I have a functioning laptop again, things should get back to normal — or whatever qualifies as normal these days.

Check out this Oscar teaser sketch:

You can check it out in HD and all that nonsense over at MTV.com.

I’ll be posting the rest of my random Toy Fair 2009 photos on Flickr, and you can catch all of the Toy Fair 2009 news on Splash Page throughout the weekend and into next week.

Despite being so busy, I’ve managed to pop up around the ‘Tubes quite a bit lately — both intentionally and, in some cases, surprisingly. Here’s a roundup of where I’ve been, starting with the most prominent time-filler, NYCC (feel free to skip to the bottom of the post for the big payoff in my list of Internet cameos):

While I was too busy to do much personal blogging during the show, my good buddy and frequent MTV Splash Page contributor David Press snapped a few photos that featured yours truly and was kind enough to send ‘em my way. You can see them all in my New York Comic Con 2009 photo set on Flickr, along with the one moment of fan gushing I allowed myself at the show: a picture with Daniel Dae Kim of “Lost.”

I ended up spending far more time doing video interviews than I anticipated during the convention, and despite changing my expectations for coverage of the show, the experience taught me a lot about how to approach future coverage of conventions. The resources, environment and approach to covering New York Comic Con with MTV News was far different than my experience with any outlet thus far, and I had to throw out quite a bit of the strategies I developed for previous outlets and look at things from an entirely different, bigger-picture point of view. It was tiring — and very, very frustrating at times — but it was an experience from which I took away a much fresher perspective on comic conventions and big-event coverage.

This week, I was asked to provide some commentary on the convention by MTV Movies Blog contributor and longtime Cinematical blogger Elisabeth Rappe (one of the most talented women covering the geek beat in the online world these days). Here’s a quick excerpt from my conversation with her, which you can read in full on Cinematical:

To answer my questions, I turned to the brilliant and talented Rick Marshall. Longtime Cinematical readers might remember him from those essential reading lists we posted last year. Well, he’s now the editor of the MTV Splash Page, and so plugged in to all things comic book that it’s scary. We were both short on time, and so we didn’t begin to approach things like “What will happen to cons if comics go entirely digital?” (Marshall, a man of the future, already downloads his. I’m still buying them in paper form, as I watch piles of Wolverine slide out from under my bed because I never have enough longboxes.)

Marshall’s take was pretty illuminating. Turns out, the comic side of NYCC benefited from Hollywood freaking out about the economy, and not sending as much silver screen talent: “The comics talent really seemed to rise to the occasion … From a movie sense it did push the media to dig into some of the lesser-known properties out there for news. I had a great talk with Greg Rucka about Whiteout. It sort of tested the movie media’s ‘comics cred’ this year. There are a lot of films like that flying a little below the radar of general movie sites, and similarly low-profile among comics sites that don’t have as much access to filmmakers and studios. So I feel like this year’s show really tested the media, and provided an opportunity for updates on those projects. These days, there isn’t a publisher out there who doesn’t have a dozen or so projects optioned or in some stage of movie production, so without the big presence of upcoming blockbusters, it was nice to just go around and check in with all of those publishers and sort of get back to one’s ‘go and find out’ reporter roots.”

My conversation with Elisabeth pretty much sums up the experience, but David Press also has a nice recap of the show that includes a few mentions of my whereabouts and activities at various points throughout the weekend.

Oh, and before I move on, I should probably extend apologies to the following people for missing out on seeing them during the show. While I was able to see approximately 92% of the people I meant to catch up with during the convention (most of them on Sunday afternoon), there were a few “missed connections” that were disappointing. So, shouts are in order for Rosscott, Van Jensen, Steven T. Cloud and Sean T. Collins (thanks for the call, man), as they were all on my “people to track down” list, but I never quite made it happen.

So, where else did I pop up around the ‘Net? Well, while I was neck-deep in NYCC planning I received several emails, text messages and phone calls alerting me to the fact that I received an “Honorable Mention” in the 30th Anniversary issue of Metroland as one of the “10 best regional writers, poets and journalists of the past 30 years” as voted on by Capital Region readers. This was pretty amazing to me, as I didn’t realize this poll existed and, therefore, didn’t campaign for any votes.

So, if any of you reading this happened to vote in that poll, I can’t thank you enough — it was a real pick-me-up during a very crazy time. Oh, and congratulations to my fellow ex-Metrolander John Rodat, who also received a hefty amount of votes and is deserving of every one of ‘em. It’s nice to see so many other people on the list who mentored me in one way or another as I got my start in journalism, including Metroland EiC/publisher (and Association of Alternative Newsweeklies president) Stephen Leon, and former Metroland News Editor Nancy Guerin, who got me my first internship as an aspiring journalist.

But that’s enough for now, as it’s the first day off I’ve had in a few weeks, and my only day off until next weekend. I’ll be covering Toy Fair International this weekend with the MTV News crew, so keep your eye on Splash Page for more of that stuff that makes everyone tell me I have the best job in the world. And thanks again, everyone who voted for me in Metroland’s poll — it means a lot.

EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW: ‘The Warriors’ #1 Comes Out To Play, Writer David Atchison Gives Us The Scoop [MTV Splash Page] – I’m a sucker for just about anything related to Walter Hill’s 1979 film “The Warriors,” so the opportunity to preview the comic book adaptation of the film and geek out with its writer was a no-brainer. 2009 is the 30th Anniversary of the film, and I know that Paramount is going to go big with promoting that fact at many of this year’s comics and pop culture conventions. That means that there will be tons of “Warriors” swag out there for fans, and maybe this is the finally the year where I dress up like a Baseball Fury for Halloween.

President Barack Obama Gets To Work On First Day In Office [MTV.com, VH1.com] – Things were pretty crazy around the MTV HQ during inauguration week, as it fell on the same week as the Sundance Film Festival and therefore required all sorts of deadline juggling from my side. I wrote up this piece for the top-level MTV.com, VH1 and related news sites around the network. In fact, now that I think of it, this might be one of my most widely circulated bylines up to this point.

Captain Marvel/Shazam Movie Still Alive? Producer Michael Uslan Hints At Film’s Future [MTV Splash Page] - For this one, I spoke with producer Michael Uslan, who produced just about every Batman film (as well as many other comics-related films) over the last few decades, and he gave me an update on the status of the live-action film based on DC’s Captain Marvel (Shazam!) character. Uslan is a phenomenally interesting guy with a long history in the comics scene. Don’t believe me? Check out his wikipedia profile.

Crimson Dynamo, Whiplash & Justin Hammer In ‘Iron Man 2’: Which Villains Should Mickey Rourke & Sam Rockwell Play? [MTV Splash Page] – After Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell were announced as potential villains in “Iron Man 2,” I took it upon myself to put together an analysis of all the relevant characters and storylines related to their potential roles, hoping to shed some light on the sequel to one of my favorite films of 2008.

Lion-O Voice Actor Discusses ‘ThunderCats’ Fan Trailer, Status Of CGI ‘ThunderCats’ Movie [MTV Splash Page] – The only thing that could’ve made this story cooler is if my interview with original Lion-O voice actor Larry Kenney was conducted via phone instead of email. Who wouldn’t want to hear Lion-O greet them?

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Push’ Director Paul McGuigan On His Superhero-Friendly Film [MTV Splash Page] – This was a fun interview with the director of the upcoming film “Push,” Paul McGuigan, who also directed “Wicker Park” and “Lucky Number Slevin.” Interesting fact: He was also tagged at one point to direct a feature film based on the Marvel Comics character Deathlok. I asked him about it, but apparently the project never progressed to any point worth discussing. However, I actually enjoyed “Push,” so I’d be curious to hear what anyone else thinks about it.

Bill Murray Joins ‘The Adventures Of Dr. McNinja’… For A Song [MTV Splash Page] – My fondness for Chris Hastings’ webcomic The Adventures of Dr. McNinja is well-documented, so when the opportunity presented itself to mention it on Splash Page, I jumped on it like Mario on a Mushroom Soldier.

I know there were tons of trailers and clips from the films debuting at Sundance lining up in the blog’s queue, and they’re doing a “Photo Booth” at the show that looks like it’s been a lot of fun. (The Spike Lee shot is my favorite.) To be honest, I usually try to stay as far off the grid as possible during the weekends and my time off, but I’ve even caught myself checking in over the last 24 hours to see what they’ve posted from the festival.

Here’s one of my favorite festival-related trailers/clips they’ve posted thus far, from a film titled “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead” that’s debuting over the weekend:

Rick’s Thankful For:

- “Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe“: While the game itself was pretty enjoyable, I’m most thankful for the twofold message its existence puts out there. Not only did DC relax control of its stable of characters enough to allow this game to happen, but they even saw fit to include fan-favorite characters who aren’t in their top-tier stable (i.e., Deathstroke). I like the cut of your jib these days, DC.

- Kenneth Branagh directing “Thor”? I don’t care if it’s still a rumor — the fact that he’s even connected with this film and people are taking it seriously feels like another vote of confidence for films based on superhero comics. I’d love to see him direct the film, sure. But it makes me happy just to know that he’s being considered for it — and more importantly, that he might be considering it.

- Matt Fraction being flown in to consult on “Iron Man 2”: It just makes sense that some of comics’ brightest minds should be involved with the films based on the characters they’re scripting. Why it’s taken this long for it to happen, I can’t even begin to understand. But now that it is happening, the future seems a little brighter for the movies I’ve been waiting to see.

- Dark Horse Comics’ “Achewood: The Great Outdoor Fight” Hardcover: While I absolutely love this collection of webcomic creator Chris Onstad‘s “Great Outdoor Fight” storyline, this one is similar to “Mortal Kombat” (in more than just the theme of the story) as to why I’m thankful for it. I’m a big fan of webcomics, and the fact that publishers like Dark Horse and so many others are beginning to notice webcomics and — *gasp* — consider them for print publication warms my heart. Also, it means I’m that much closer to seeing a movie based on “The Adventures of Dr. McNinja” or “Goats.”

- “Watchmen” — with or without the squid: I know Casey already mentioned this one, but I feel so strongly about it that I had to second the motion.

- “Herbie” Archive, Vol. 1: He’s the Fat Fury, folks. Don’t make me bop you with this here lollipop.