Culture

Every little thing about how Frank Darabont worked AMC's last raw nerve as showrunner of The Walking Dead and some more TV and film news for your Friday surfing pleasure.

Back when the deeds of Kyrax2 were making the rounds, we'd tagged a post we never got around to spotlighting by author Diane Duane, who lists her bio as "30+ years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV and movie work, the NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Also: the Young Wizards series, 1983-2010 and beyond"--the kind of long-lasting, multi-media resume that superior writers build up. In a post on her blog about DC's women troubles, Duane talked about being a comics reader and creator over the years:

Over on Google+, Meredith Gran, creator of OCTOPUS PIE, somewhat reluctantly weighs in on the women in comics thing:

So that said, here it is. My sincere thoughts on how to promote the presence of women in comics:

Pay them. No, seriously. Pay them with money.

While we were linking to the previous Michael Dooley articles, we found another one from Comic-Con, an interview with Kim Munson, whose Comix Classics: Underground Comics app for iPhone, iPad, and Android hard a hard time getting approved. The app is a survey of classic underground comics art with images from S. Clay Wilson, Reed Waller, Denis Kitchen and more. The pictures are quite dirty -- we struggled to find one to post with this piece before settling on Jimmy Durante by Drew Friedman -- but nothing that isn't legal and available in other places. However, Apple, the electronic middleman, has other ideas:

Based on what we know of publishing data, August 8th, 1961 was the day FANTASTIC FOUR #1 arrived on newsstands. Tom Brevoort sent out a birthday tweet. Although there's talk of boycotts and justified anger over Marvel's shoddy treatment of some of its greatest talent over the years, we should still mark this day. Pairing the protean storytelling of Ditko and Kirby with the breezy populism of Stan Lee created some of the greatest adventure comics that have ever been, and we suspect they'll be read for another 50 years.

This is so cool. Nick Abadzis writes to remind us that his strips for the 25th Anniversary of Big Planet Comics has ended: a series of gorgeous alternate endings to his GN LAIKA, about the dog who went into space ... and never came back. Four strips are up here, with tributes to "Stan and Jack (Stan referring to both the Man and Kubrick), and several iterations of how the story could've turned out." The final episode definitely calls out for a sequel/spin-off.

Here's a widely distributed pic of Henry Cavill in Man of Steel (via The Beat)...And here's one of Anne Hathaway as Catwoman in The...

Mr. Tony Lee, author of many Doctor Who and soon MacGyver stories, has posted some thoughts on guest behavior at cons, basically saying that if you are a paid-for guest, you should stay a guest after hours, and not just on the show floor.

There have been about 42 multigabillion reactions in the media to the new multi-culti-ultimate Spider-Man, and we're not going to link to all of them, but here are the three best that have crossed our desk today. Perhaps we'll update this post if more good ones come in. • As you can see Stephen Colbert weighed in last night with some funny, funny jokes. Colbert is an avowed comics fan with many crossovers in his resume already, including having Joe Quesada on as a guest, and guesting himself in an issue of Spider-man.

We've suggested here several times that if someone wants to make some easy money, get Adam West and William Shatner together in a movie as retired detectives who just wander around saying things. Admit it! You would listen to West's mahogany stylings and Shatner's stentorian cadences non-stop!

In one of my rebuttals to one of the idiotic racist postings on The Beat yesterday, I Almost....ALMOST made a reference to Glenn Beck along the lines of, "Glenn Beck should start a line of comics just for all the angry white men; sales would soar." And then I thought, oh that's too knee-jerk. What was I thinking?

Morgan Spurlock's documentary recapping the 2010 Comic-Con will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, it's being reported. The film -- backed by a nerd pantheon of people like Stan Lee, Joss Whedon and Thomas Tull -- was show at last year's con and was expected to perhaps debut at this year's, but Spurlock is going for a bigger film venue in TIFF.