I’ll be honest, here: as I get older, one of the things that bugs me about comics are the ridiculous outfits way too many superheroines have to wear.

I mean, it’s gotten better. When I was reading DC in the eighties, there was still plenty of superpowered women in bathing suits and high heels with breasts that can only be described with terms like “knockers” or “gazongas”. Thirty years later…OK, maybe things haven’t changed that much. But at least most superheroines these days are wearing sensible pants.

Anyway, by far the worst offender in this respect has been Emma Frost, whose outfits have just gotten skimpier and skimpier over time. Fortunately, sketch group Nerd Bastards noticed as well. Their perspective on her outfits, and the problems they may cause, under the jump.
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If you’re not a fan of “Liberty Meadows”, you might be a fan of cheesecake, so, either way, the news that Frank Cho has pulled “Liberty Meadows” out of development hell and is back on a publication schedule, with issue #38 coming out later this year, is great news. Especially since issue #37 came out five years ago.

So, what happened? Cho had the typical Hollywood experience of clueless executives, retarded ideas, regime changes, and waffling that pretty much defines the development hell experience. In his own words:

Let’s back track a minute. About 3 years ago, Sony got the rights to Liberty Meadows to develop it as a downloadable original cartoon series for their new Sony Digital division. I wrote the original pilot episode but it was rejected for being too “risque”. So other writers were brought in to tone it down and make it more kid friendly. Once I read the rewrite, I thought it completely missed the point of Liberty Meadows. So I rewrote the rewrite, and this went back and forth couple of times until we reached a compromised script. We turned that script into an traditional 2D animated pilot episode.

Enter Sony Television division. They saw the pilot episode and liked it. Liberty Meadows get bumped up to their television division and a TV series is planned. However there is one request, Sony Television people wanted Liberty Meadows to be more “risque” with adult humor like the “Family Guy”. This is the point where I rip my hair out in frustration. Sony Digital people rejected my original script for that very reason, for being too “risque”.

So I go back and re-polish the original script, adding more scenes to make it longer to fit the television episode time frame. As I’m doing this, a new Sony television contract is being drafted to replace my Sony digital contract. Then the recession hit. Then the three Sony executives who were shepherding this project along since the beginning leave Sony. The new guy who takes over have no interest in projects started by his predecessors. Thus Liberty Meadows TV show goes into limbo… and we wait and wait. Ultimately under the inactivity clause, all the Liberty Meadows rights revert back to me, and concludes my 2 year journey at Sony.

“Liberty Meadows as a Family Guy clone” sounds almost, but not quite, as appealing as being lit on fire, so thank God that’s by the boards. If Brandy said something like “that reminds me of the time I used a pop culture reference to substitute for an actual joke”, it’d prove TV as a medium should be ended.

[ via the rehabbed animals at BleedingCool ]

Last week Conan O’Brien interviewed the Creative Director of Warner Brothers Animation, Peter Gerardi, about DC superheroes who suck. This week they’re back, and Conan brought in his graphic designer Pierre Bernard to pitch “design improvements” for the ladies of DC.  Here there be boobs.

If you’ve been a fan of Conan’s shows for a while, you probably already familiar with Bernard, a graphic designer for Conan as well as his old gigs at Late Night and The Tonight Show. He’s also a pretty big comics fan, as evidenced by the “Recliner of Rage” segments he starred in on Late Night that saw him, and I quote, “furious” over Marvel’s decision to cancel their line of paperback novels about the X-Men and the problems with the Justice League Unlimited action figures. [ComicsAlliance]

So the guy has comic nerd cred, but he also has a perverted streak Conan didn’t seem to know about prior to this segment. Although I will admit, the third redesign is beyond awesome. That one needs to happen.

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Have I mentioned how much I love the U.K. lately? Not only did they give us the bosom of Katie Price, but now they lead the fight in mobile Female Boobie Inspection as well. Enter Professor Zhipeng Wu from the University of Manchester in the U.K., he’s the crazy chesticle genius who developed this awesome technology. Through emitting radio waves, this grapefruit holder-lookin’ thingy can scan individual breasts (even still in their bra) and broadcast a realtime image.

Something, something, joke about boob tube. *pie in the face*

Sing it, Dvice:

The portable scanner even has quite the leg up on the usual X-ray mammography equipment, as the lunchbox-sized unit performs tests in real-time, meaning it could spy a complication that a larger X-ray unit would miss. What’s more, it doesn’t deal the large dose of radiation a typical mammogram does, which is important for women who are in the later stages of breast cancer. It can do all this without the gels and the setup of a mammogram — all a woman has to do is simply dip her breast into the scanning cup, even while still wearing her bra. Sizes shouldn’t matter, as the cup can be filled with any ol’ liquid (such as water, oil, milk or the like) and still complete the scan.

Pretty awesome, I gotta’ be honest. Crack all the teeth jokes you want, tease them because we made it to the moon first, but don’t knock the fact that the U.K. beat us to the mammary first. Below is a short video of the tiny scanner in action…at least I think that’s what it is. It kind of looks like it could possibly be footage from DJ Hero. Yeah, that could be it, I think it’s from a video game.

Video after the jump:

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Of course you are.

Researchers at Japan’s Gifu University are working on HIRO III, a haptic interface that is combined with a 3D picture to create the illusion that you are touching the object on the screen.  It’s the first system to provide realistic sensations (like the weight of an object) at the user’s fingertips.  It has fifteen degrees of freedom in the hand and another six in the arm, but let’s get right to the point: boobs.

In the video below, Professor Haruhisa Kawasaki explains the system, with an emphasis on how it can be used to train doctors to perform breast examinations. Giggity.  And here’s a quote from the interview: “Although mammography screening is becoming more advanced, tactile examination is still necessary.” Oh, that’s a giggity.  I bet some doctors love saying that.

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    These are gorillas, you say?  Fool, you call me? En garde.

The Times published a serious article about inhibiting the action of myostatin to allow muscles to continue growing in people with degenerative muscle diseases.  Then i09 wisely picked up on the most important part of the article and ran it under the headline Gene Therapy Creates Superstrong Monkeys.  Well played, chaps.

They decided to test whether artificially introducing follistatin to the body would lead to an increase in strength and muscle mass. Using a common cold virus as a carrier, the researchers injected the follistatin gene into the thigh muscles of six macaque monkeys. The monkeys’ thigh muscles grew an average of 15 percent as a result of the treatment, and one monkey experienced an incredible 78 percent increase in strength. The researchers reported in Science Translational Medicine that, after 15 months, the increases remained and that the monkeys experienced no visible side effects.  The researchers hope to start clinical trials on humans next year, with an eye toward helping people with degenerative muscular diseases. But for healthy individuals looking to increase their strength, the treatment would come at a cost: immunosuppressant drugs [Ed.- insert "Hitman monkey with AIDS" joke . . . here.] are a necessary component of the therapy. [i09]

Yeah, sure, eventually this could lead to a treatment for Jerry’s Kids, but let’s not lose sight of a more immediate benefit, supermonkey swordfights:

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