Weekly World News, the quintessential conspiracy rag, is getting a tongue-in-cheek makeover by its new owners, Bat Boy LTD. Taking it's name from one of WWN well-known leads, Bat Boy is buying the supermarket tabloid from AMI and plans to reinvent the weekly "kind of like Marvel before it got into movies." Take that, comic book sellouts, cheapening the genre of "graphic novels" for the sake of the allmighty dollar!

Okay, so how does this new Weekly World News plan to make money? Why, merchandising and movie deals of course!

McGinness has already struck deals to splash the tabloid's characters on posters, greeting cards, and calendars. Bat Boy, for instance, is in the process of writing a memoir called "The Audacity of Sonar."

McGinness has also scored product placement for his title in movies by Dreamworks and Warner Bros. The investor would not disclose terms of the deal.

Unfortunately, there's no way you can convince ironic 20-somethings to actually buy a parody paper (The Onion is free, remember) so souless corporate merchandizing is actually the only way to go. Still, it's hard to imagine the whole camp value of the actual paper lasting more than a couple issues after the Bat Boy takeover changes the tone and loses their paying fanbase of borderline schizophrenics.

And besides…wasn't there already a Bat Boy musical?