Viral online marketing is so pre-Cloverfield, you may be thinking to yourself, but don't tell that to Joe Tolerico. He's the guy in charge of all the online shenanigans supporting NBC's Heroes, which now goes by the name of Heroes: Evolution. Over at the Heroes Wiki, Tolerico explains what won't be spinning out of the show that made it okay to steal ideas from twenty-year-old comic books.

We have all sorts of ideas we are exploring. And there's plenty of joking around about what Heroes should NOT become. Our head of digital entertainment teases Tim Kring about "Heroes on Ice" (with all due respect to figure skaters).

With the show off air for the foreseeable future, Heroes: Evolutions offers the only chance for fans to interact with their favorite characters... and for those characters to interact back. Says Tolerico:

Masi Oka writes and creates all of the Hiro blog entries himself. I put together the Drucker postcard code and our lead designer (Markus Hagen) created the artwork and flash file. The games and riddles for Heroes Evolutions are developed by our in-house team and the Heroes Transmedia team working together with the show writers to help guide us and keep us within the show's mythology... We miss our show writers and hope the strike is settled soon. We are working to develop pieces that are interesting to the fans, but with no new episodes these are different stories. Fortunately the tapestry of Heroes provides us with many different places to "play."

When the show returns to NBC, Tolerico promises more interaction between the show and Evolutions, including more plots crossing over between platforms. If this means more than Hana Gitelman appearing in a couple of scenes of season 1 before disappearing into the online comic book, then I'm potentially in...

http://io9.com/349964/web-version-of-heroes-will-begin-crossing-over-into-tv

Now here's an angle on the strike I hadn't even considered: Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch blog asks what might the strike do to Comic Con? We've seen it kill the Golden Globes, and the Oscars remain in mortal peril, but what about the biggest event of the year for nerds like you and me? Sure, it's a comic book convention, but that joint isn't getting filled to maximum capacity because Rob Liefeld is doing sketches of you with huge tits and tiny feet - it's about the major presentations in Hall H, where the upcoming genre films show footage and parade their stars.

Of course the reason I didn't think about it is that the strike will be over by then, and if not Comic Con is the least of anyone's worries. If the strike goes through the summer we're looking at directors and actors possibly walking as well, which is a Hollywood Apocalypse in action. It's a major disaster. I'm pretty confident all of this will be wrapped up before the summer, so nobody's going to have to worry about crossing picket lines to get into the San Diego Convention Center.

What's going to be interesting is how the fall out from the current strike will affect the Con. Last year TV shows were some of the biggest draws, but the strike has already slain television; there will almost certainly be no new genre shows to come to Con in July, and the current shows -assuming they don't get canceled as a way of saving money - will likely have no new episodes. I guess people from shows like Lost or Heroes will still show up, but it's going to be like a Star Trek convention in the early 90s, when George Takei showed up not to talk about his future plans but to endlessly chat about running around shirtless with a sword in one episode back in 1964.

I feel pretty confident that we'll be seeing new Watchmen footage this July in San Diego. Although part of me wonders that if the strike does metastasize in June, will actors and directors travel down to San Diego not to flog their films but to picket the Center? Would JJ Abrams sign autographs while marching in front of Hall H?

http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=13227