Joss Whedon, the creator of the wildly successful Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series and the not quite so successful but still highly regarded Firefly had an interesting problem earlier this year: what to do when all the writers are on strike?

When all his contemporaries were concocting ever-more-derivative reality concepts, Whedon stuck to his fanboy roots and created a not especially gifted supervillain exclusively for the Internet, as first reported in Web Watcher recently. Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is the musical tale of that villain, played by a “still just recognisable as Doctor Doogie Hauser” Neil Patrick Harris, as he tilts quixotically at his nemesis - Captain Hammer (Firefly's Nathan Fillion).

Currently licensing restrictions exclude those British readers who are not inclined to search the web for the secret trick that disguises their computer's location from viewing the official site (www.drhorrible.com) but Dr Horrible also has a YouTube channel (youtube.com/user/doctorhorrible), which features a trailer and other assorted snippets and the full episodes are expected there shortly. The entire series will be downloadable from iTunes later in the summer.

Staying in the realm of the marvellous, the mysterious and the unlikely, Dear Beautiful - the story of a man whose beloved wife rather inconveniently becomes a zombie, is being developed from an animated short into a full-length movie. The original hallucinatory short can still be found online (tinyurl.com/59tkob) and you can watch a trailer for the new version at the hipster's sci-fi blog of choice i09 (tinyurl.com/6yfxee).

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