Oh, it’s a good time to be a geek.  The King of the Cerebral Geeks – that’d be Memento’s Christopher Nolan – has his latest comic book noir hitting screens next week and early buzz has a posthumous Oscar nom for Heath Ledger looking likely. But before that happens the King of the Television Geeks – that’d be Buffy’s Joss Whedon – has his first new project since Firefly hitting the net for free and before THAT happens the King of the Mythic Geeks – that’d be Pan’s Labyrinth’s Guillermo Del Toro – arrives with his second Hellboy film. Any more geek-y bliss and I’ll end up curled up in a little ball and drooling heavily underneath a desk somewhere. Insert happy sigh here.

Any talk of Batman will wait until next week but as for the other two, there’s no time like the present.

Whedon first. Never seen the musical episode of Buffy?  Well, then, shame on you because it’s officially one of the Best Things Ever. I mean, come on, it’s got a full on song and dance number celebrating the removal of a mustard stain and that’s just BRILLIANT. Screw Rogers and Hammerstein, the musical genius of our generation is Joss Whedon and he’s at it again.

Titled Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, the goofy one off project will eventually be released on DVD but will first be released in three free installments on the official site starting on the 14^th. Which is the day after my birthday. Thanks, Joss, but how will you top this next year? What do you need to know besides the fact that it’s a musical? Neil Patrick Harris – yeah, that’s Doogie Howser to you – stars as a meek supervillain doing battle with a charismatic hero played by Firefly’s Nathan Fillion. Harris has proven to be a pretty impressive comic talent as he’s grown up and, in my opinion, Fillion could be the guy to dethrone Bruce Campbell as the King of Cult Movies if he ever chose to go down that road. There are a lot of Kings in this column.

Right.  Hellboy. I begin by saying that while I truly love Del Toro’s first Hellboy film and think it’s truly remarkable just how true it is to Mike Mignola’s original creation, especially considering that Hellboy is a big-studio controlled title. But while it may be surprisingly close to the source material concessions still had to be made to keep studio suits happy and Del Toro didn’t get to make quite the film he really wanted to make. A few years later Del Toro has become one of the most respected film makers in the world on the strength of Pan’s Labyrinth and there aint no studio suit in the world dumb enough to try and tell the big Mexican how to shoot a fantasy picture. So Hellboy II: The Golden Army is exactly the film Del Toro wanted to make.

The Del Toro trademarks are all there and while the temptation may be to focus on the stunning creature effects, which are truly brilliant, doing that risks overlooking what I think is the man’s greatest strength: Del Toro is a brilliant writer.  He remembers what it’s like to believe in a world filled with fantasy and possibility, he knows what it’s like to feel that beauty slipping away, and he knows that humans can be entirely lacking in humanity while the ‘monstrous’ can be the most humane. These are films – and comic books for that matter – that deserve to break out of the comic book ghetto, films that are about a whole lot more than a kitten-loving demon. Del Toro is a fabulist of the highest order and he’s at the peak of his powers.

And as a wee PS: if all this isn’t enough geekery for you and you happen to be in the Montreal area, get yourself out to the Fantasia Festival and check out a big ol’ selection of the year’s best genre films from around the world. It’s huge, it’s good and I helped program it.