At last, some comic book news that isn't centered around Batman or Spider-Man! Omelete got their hands on some official images from two of Warner Bros' upcoming comic flicks, Jonah Hex and The Losers.

We've seen paparazzi glimpses from the Hex set of Megan Fox and Josh Brolin, but there's nothing like a well-lit and spooky shot, especially when your actor looks good enough to have walked off the page. If you're a fan of the haunted gunslinger and are unconvinced, you might be comforted by the sight of his Confederate gray and mangled lip. I can't say how excited I am for this film. Jonah Hex is a character who has more in common with High Plains Drifter than the capes and superpower crowd, and I think that will surprise and delight a lot of "newbies" who still equate DC Comics with Batman.

Next up, we have our first official look at The Losers! Aren't they a handsome bunch? This is based not on the DC war squad from the 1970s, but on the Vertigo spinoff by Andy Diggle. The Losers are a Special Forces team abandoned and left to die by their mysterious commander, Max. They regroup, vow revenge, and let the bullets fly. I have hopes that this one will be a solid action flick, the kind we all long for from the 1980s. The cast is certainly a lovely one: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans, Columbus Short, Idris Elba, and Oscar Jaenada are our fine Losers, and Jason Patric will be the villainous Max. You can see the whole line-up of them here, along a very sexy shot of Saldana. Even I can appreciate a lovely lady when she's packing guns. Now, if they'll just release a photo of Morgan to match ...

The photos are below in our gallery. Spend your Turkey Day geeking out.

As you've probably noticed by now, I'm a sucker for Westerns. It took me awhile to warm up to the genre. I live on the high plains and have one gig giving Old West tours in petticoats to my credit, so they were hardly escapism. Of course, now that I finally like them, there's just not that many being made. Lately, there's stirs of a re-imagining going on. Filmmakers and audiences are realizing Westerns can be fun again and in a repeat of the 1960s, the charge is coming from overseas. Film fans already know about Asia's madcap forays into the genre with The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, Sukiyaki Western Django, and the upcoming The Warrior's Way. But now France is getting in on the draw with Lucky Luke, and TwitchFilm has nabbed a trailer for it.

Lucky Luke is based on a French comic series, which (as per Wikipedia) was equal parts satire and good old fashioned Western. He's your typical lone gunslinger, wandering the borders in search of injustice, a heavy burden weighing on his shoulders, a deep characterization that's a bit at odds with its simplistic art. (He looks a bit like Woody from Toy Story.) How it spawned this crazy, stylish, bullet-ridden feature is a mystery, but it did, and I'm thankful. I'm desperate to see this, and to be better acquainted with Jean Dujardin. Ooh la la.

The trailer is embedded below the jump. Watch it, and join Twitchfilm, CHUD, and Cinematical in demanding a stateside release. You know you want to spend more time in this vision of the Old West.

[via CHUD]

Great villains are scattered throughout the Westerns, but some of the most memorably savage come from the films of Sergio Leone. While Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West gets a lot of props for the way he mows down the McBain family (including its youngest and most adorable moppet), it was nothing that Lee Van Cleef hadn't already done in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Angel Eyes seems to be dismissed as something akin to Leone fan fiction, and it's his relation (or lack of) to Van Cleef's Col. Mortimer in A Few Dollars More that people find to be more interesting than his villainy.

But he's a great villain, mostly because he's absent for much for so much of the film. Leone gives him a ruthless introduction (a scene Quentin Tarantino mirrored perfectly with Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds) and promptly yanks him out of the narrative. As Tuco and Blondie torture each other for an hour, Angel Eyes is doing his own thing and it's a wonderful shock when he shows up running a Civil War prison camp. In today's cinema, no one could resist giving Angel Eyes a prequel and a spin-off relating the trail of bodies that led to that alias and that prison camp. But Leone allowed a squint to speak for itself, and told you everything you needed to know by the way men like Blondie and Tuco squirm around him. Considering that no one in this film is exactly good, and they're all a little bit ugly, it takes a lot to convince us that a man is worse than all the others. Van Cleef and Leone did that, and few villains can match his nastiness even when they've got double the screen time.

Go below the jump -- they don't call him Angel Eyes in here!

You learn something new about your movie tastes when you're writing about them every single day. I'm realizing that most of my favorite montages don't come from the 1980s, but are historical recreations of one kind or another. (Even now, there's one hovering in my bookmarks because I can't decide whether it's a montage or a credits report. You'll see it eventually, I'm sure.) Today's montage is from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and has to be one of the most unusual because it's done entirely through still sepia photographs. It's a wonderful sequence, and the photos of Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Katharine Ross would look at home in your western history museum. For a bunch of photos, it feels incredibly animated by the endless fun Butch and Sundance are having, clearly enjoying the fact that they're wanted men who can go unnoticed in a crowd as they party their way to Bolivia. Try looking at it through the lens of our celebrity drenched culture, because it really seems to hint at a future when Butch and Sundance would have been as obsessively photographed as Brangelina. The clothes might be outdated and the color might be sepia, but any one of these shots would look at home on Just Jared or Perez Hilton.

The best thing about this sequence is that it was created out of accident and necessity. Director George Roy Hill assumed that when it came time to film the New York sequences, he'd be able to use the sets from Hello, Dolly! as it was filming right next door. But 20th Century Fox denied them permission as they wanted to keep the sets a secret. So Hill just photographed the actors posing on set, and spliced them together with hundreds of historical photos. The result was much more interesting than just having them wander around a sound stage, don't you think?